Oskar Kokoschka

Life

Style & Innovation

Kokoschka's revolution lay in changing what a portrait is supposed to depict. Where the Secession and Impressionism dealt with appearance, light, and surface, he deliberately scattered the likeness of outward form and made visible the sitter's psyche, anxiety, and vital force. In the so-called 'black portraits' of his early Vienna years (1909-1914), he emptied the background into a dark, ambiguous mist and concentrated the nerve of the painting on the face and especially the hands — hands twisted and veined, eyes painted like windows opening onto the inner life. In his pictures it is as if the skin has lifted away from the body, so that the viewer, as though passing through a veil, sees clear through to the sitter's physiognomy. This 'X-ray' vision, which seems to see through to the nerves and blood vessels beneath the skin, resonates with the spirit of an age in which, in that same Vienna, Freud was exploring the unconscious through psychoanalysis. Crucially, he painted not portraits commissioned by clients but sitters of his own choosing, free to work as he pleased — and so, released from the pressure of likeness, he could put psychology first. In the seven-section narrative of this Detroit Institute of Arts masterpiece exhibition, Kokoschka stands in the final section — Expressionism (Section 7) — as its representative artist, paired alongside Max Beckmann (at the Rome leg of the tour, Emil Nolde was added as well, so that German and Austrian Expressionism brought the show to its close). The exhibition begins with Courbet's Realism and proceeds through Impressionism (light) → Post-Impressionism (emotion and viewpoint) → Symbolism → Fauvism (the liberation of color, Matisse) → Cubism (the dismantling of form, Picasso), arriving in Expressionism at the stage of 'distorting form for the sake of an inner truth,' and closing with the abstraction of Kandinsky. If Matisse liberated color and Picasso dismantled form, Kokoschka used that freedom to 'nail a human soul to the canvas.' In his later years he moved toward a more restrained palette of ochre, gray, and blue and shorter brushstrokes, arriving at meditative compositions — but the core that never changed across his lifetime was the conviction that 'to see is to gain insight.'

Technique

Kokoschka's surface is one that is 'scratched, scraped, and trembling.' He used not only the brush but the butt end of the brush and his own fingers and fingernails, incising lines by scraping across the still-wet paint (in the manner of sgraffito). As a result, fine cross-hatching and scratch marks are laid like a spider's web across the faces and hands of his portraits, while the paint layer is an irregular coexistence of thickly built-up impasto, thinly translucent passages, and patches of bare canvas. Standing before the actual work — first, look at the hands. For Kokoschka, the hand is a second face. The nervous state of the sitter can be read in the abnormally long or twisted fingers, the prominent knuckles and tendons. Second, look at the 'scratched grain' of the facial skin. It is not a smooth complexion; rather, thin, nervous lines gouged out with a tool after the paint was laid down create the expression. Stand slightly to one side so the light rakes across the surface, and the depth of this incising and the impasto will be revealed more vividly. Third, look at the eyes and the gaze — asymmetrical eyes or a gaze that drifts out of focus lend the sitter an air of unease. Fourth, in works of the Dresden period (1916-1923) such as 'Girl with Doll,' look at the color. He laid densely painted blocks of varied color like a carpet, linking the figures and their surrounding space across broad fields of color, so that color itself becomes the chief carrier of emotion. Fifth, the later one goes, the more this shifts to a restrained palette of ochre, gray, and blue and to short brushstrokes, taking on a meditative vibration in place of violent contrast. From the standpoint of conservation science, his early works have in some cases been reported to show, under X-ray and infrared analysis, a rapid working speed and frequent pentimenti (traces of reworking). Remembering that his paintings — down to the frame and the gloss of the surface — deliberately leave behind not 'a finished smoothness' but 'a turbulence still in the making' will deepen your appreciation.

Key Works

Behind the Canvas

Connections

Kokoschka set out in Vienna within the orbit of Gustav Klimt, the Vienna Secession, and the Wiener Werkstätte, but rejected their decorativeness, and together with the fellow Viennese Egon Schiele he is bracketed as one of the two pillars of Austrian Expressionism (Schiele probed the eros and skeleton of the body, Kokoschka the psyche and the hands and eyes). In the seven-section narrative of this exhibition he is directly paired with his Expressionism (Section 7) colleague Max Beckmann, and at the Rome leg of the tour Emil Nolde was added as well, so that German and Austrian Expressionism brought the show to its close — where Beckmann treated the trauma of war and society in theatrical compositions, Kokoschka peers into the inner life of a single human being as if under a microscope. The freedom opened up by Matisse (the liberation of color in Fauvism) and Picasso (the dismantling of form in Cubism) in the preceding sections, Kokoschka turned back and put to the use of expressing the human psyche. His passionate lover Alma Mahler was the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler and a central figure of Viennese Modernism, entangled also with the architect Walter Gropius and the writer Franz Werfel. The spirit of that same Vienna, in which Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, was exploring the unconscious, resonates with his 'psychological portraits.' The animal subject that gave rise to the DIA's 'The Cat' is said to have arisen from his encounter with the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley.

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