"We seldom get into trouble when we speak softly. It is only when we raise our voices that the sparks fly and tiny molehills become great mountains of contention."
Physically,
painter Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) was big enough, 6'4", to
have been
an all-star professional football tackle, had he been born in another
place and time.
Instead,
he became one of the artists excoriated as degenerate by Adolf
Hitler, who burned thousands of paintings created by a score of such
artists. He managed to escape Austria before the German takeover,
become a Czech citizen and then a British citizen, live in America,
and finally settle in Switzerland.
It
was there, in Villeneuve, near Montreux, where my good friend Joseph
Cooper tracked him down, an event that Joe tells with undiminished
glow so many years after it happened.
A
tortured life led to Oskar’s meandering from country to country
and continent to continent. Honed by tumultuous years, the
78-year-old man Cooper met in 1964 turned out to be affable and kind.
Oskar
was the second child born to a Czech goldsmith. Shortly after his
birth, a fire broke out in Pocharn, where he was born. The event gave
him a lifelong belief in omens.
His
older brother had died in infancy. Oskar was followed by a sister and
a brother. The family was not prosperous, and Oscar’s first
moves as a child were to ever-more-humble homes. Losing faith in his
father, he drew closer to his mother and eventually, as the oldest
sibling, felt he was head of the household.
He
went to a secondary school where the emphasis was on science and
language, subjects for which he had scant interest. During his
lessons he buried himself in reading classic literature.
Sensing
the boy’s abilities, a professor suggested he consider a career
in fine art, an idea that was repugnant to Oskar’s father. Out
of 153 applicants, Oskar became one of three accepted for admission
to the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna. The school was not as
prestigious as the city’s Academy of Fine Arts, where many of
the teachers were caught up in the Vienna Secession, a modernist
movement.
His
best professor at Arts and Crafts, 1904-09, helped Oskar develop his
own voice. However, the school gave him no formal training in
painting, and he had to teach himself. While in school, helped by his
professors and the Vienna Workshops, he was commissioned to paint
fans, postcards, and children’s portraits.
In
1908, the Workshops published a volume of his poetry. He was 22. That
same year his exhibit of paintings in the Vienna Kunstschau
was so severely criticized that he was dismissed from his school.
Architect Adolf Loos took a vigorous interest in him and began
introducing him to the right people.
Oskar’s
first important one-man show was at the well-respected Galerie Paul
Cassirer in Berlin in 1910. Shortly afterwards he exhibited at the
museum in Essen. From 1910-1914 he concentrated on portraiture.
A stamp depicting Konrad Adenauer. Painting by Oscar Kokoschka.
Although
Kokoschka kept a distance from the dominant German Expressionist
movement, whose artists led to some of the most significant forays in
modern art, he is considered one of its masters. Despite the
individuality of this style, or maybe because of it, he began
painting Viennese celebrities. In much later years he would paint
Konrad Adenauer, who led post-Nazi Germany out of ruin.
In
addition to poetry, Oskar began writing plays which were considered
the first examples of Expressionist drama. In his own right, he
became a Vienna semi-celebrity, invited to places where celebrities
go.
In
1912, when Oskar was 26, he fell madly in love with Alma Schindler
Mahler, the wife of Composer Victor Mahler (1860-1911).
Alma
was studying ballet when she met Mahler, 19 years her senior. She
rejected him because, she said, of “the scandals about him and
every young woman who aspires to sing in opera.” Nonetheless,
they married in 1902.
Alma Mahler, the love of Kokoschka's life (and the love of many others)
Writing
in the Chicago Tribune, John von Rheim said of Alma, “She
was wife to three famous husbands — composer Gustav Mahler,
architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, and author Franz Werfel
— mistress to artist Oskar Kokoschka, and lover to many other
prominent men.”
The Bride of the Wind or The Tempest, oil on canvas, a self-portrait expressing Kokoschka's unrequited love for Alma Mahler, 1914
Von
Rhein quotes a variety of sources who call Alma “a monster,”
“the worst human being I ever knew,” and “a grande
dame and at the same time a cesspool.”
While
Mahler was still alive, Alma reveled in a torrid relationship with
Gropius. Then she took up with Kokoschka, playing one man against the
other. After several years of intimacy with Oskar, Alma rejected him,
“afraid of becoming too overcome with passion.”
Kokoschka
never got over loving Alma, the subject of one of his greatest works,
The Bride of the Wind (The Tempest). No surprise, he wrote
poetry inspired by his passion for her.
Businessmen
Isidor Zuckerman (1866-1946) and Emil Reitler regularly hosted
Saturday and Sunday night suppers, salons known as the Vienna
Gatherings. Reitler was a banker. Zuckerman’s fortune was based
on a group of wood, timber, and plywood companies. These exploited
large forests in Poland. (His son Karl established a plywood business
near Liverpool. During WWII the company manufactured products used in
airplanes and submarines.)
Oskar
Kokoschka was a guest at these Vienna Gatherings.
Kokoschka
divided his time between Berlin and Vienna. After volunteering for
the Austrian cavalry at the outbreak of the Great War (WWI), in 1915
he was grievously wounded. The military doctors decided he was
mentally unstable. Afterwards, he wandered about Europe painting
landscapes in his own style.
He
settled in Dresden and then accepted a professorship in its Academy.
During the 1920s and 1930s he traveled extensively in Europe, North
Africa, and the Middle East. In 1931, he returned to Vienna. Dismayed
by the growing power of the Nazis, he moved to Prague in 1931, and
acquired Czech citizenship.
Like
all of the German Expressionists and other modern painters, Kokoschka
was denounced as a degenerate by the Nazis. In Prague, he and other
expatriates became known as the Oskar-Kokoschka-Bund. But when the
Czechs began mobilizing to fight the feared Nazi invasion, he fled to
England. The British were able to help all members of the OKB escape
through Poland and Sweden.
The
same year he fled to the UK, 1938, he enjoyed his first solo show in
New York.
During
the UK summers, Oskar and his wife lived in Scotland, where he
painted watercolor landscapes.
Oskar
became a British citizen in 1946, settled briefly in America the next
year, then settled permanently in Switzerland, even though he
regained Austrian citizenship in 1978.
Joseph
Cooper’s artist wife Elaine was an artist and ardent admirer of
Kokoschka’s art. In 1964, Joe went to Europe on an
international marketing assignment for TWA. At a Frankfurt gallery he
purchased two Kokoschka lithographs. He obtained a letter of
introduction to the artist from the gallery but didn’t know
where to find him.
Arriving
in Zurich, Joe went for assistance to the American Counsel, which was
able to supply address and a phone number.
Accompanied
by a man from the United States government, Joe went from Zurich to
Geneva, from where he telephoned Kokoschka. Joe was surprised when
the artist answered his own phone and in English.
Joe
explained that he was the grandson of Rose Zuckerman, Isidor
Zuckerman’s sister. Yes, of course Oskar remembered the
Zuckermans and the Vienna Gatherings half a century before.
Oskar
agreed to meet Joe later that afternoon.
Still
uncertain about the meeting, Joe and the other American drove a
rented Volkswagon from Geneva to the other end of Lake Geneva, ate
lunch at Chillon, visited the old castle immortalized by Byron’s
poem “The Prisoner of Chillon,” and drove on to
Villeneuve to have their few moments with the old artist. (Not
interested in art, the other man was bored by the whole encounter.)
The
half-hour meeting was warm and convivial. From the tubes he carried,
Joe took out the two lithographs. One was signed, the other was not.
Kokoschka
called his wife Olga and unrolled the lithographs on the dining
table.
In
a very nostalgic moment, he paused while examining the black and
white portrait of Kathie Richter. She had been his mistress in
Dresden, before he met Alma Mahler.
Enhanced litho of Kathie Richter by Oskar Kokokoschka
This
litho was signed. Kokoschka took a piece of charcoal out of his
pocket and made some enhancements to the portrait, making it a unique
piece of far more value. “I remember her very well,” the
painter mused. “I’ve just made it an artist’s
proof.”
The
other litho, of another girl friend, was unsigned. Kokoschka signed
it.
Elaine
Cooper was overjoyed to receive two pieces of art by one of her
favorite artists.
Some
years later in the Beverly Hills, CA home of his cousins who were
descended from Emil Reitler of the Vienna Gatherings, Joe Cooper met
Alma Mahler. “I was not impressed. Age had not preserved her
beauty.”
Lawrence Jeppson is an art consultant, organizer and curator of art exhibitions, writer, editor
and publisher, lecturer, art historian, and appraiser. He is America's leading authority on
modern, handwoven French tapestries. He is expert on the works of William Henry Clapp, Nat
Leeb, Tsing-fang Chen, and several French artists.
He is founding president of the non-profit Mathieu Matégot Foundation for Contemporary
Tapestry, whose purview encompasses all 20th-century tapestry, an interest that traces back to
1948. For many years he represented the Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie and
Arelis in America.
Through the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, the American Federation of
Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, and his own Art Circuit Services he has been a contributor to
or organizer of more than 200 art exhibitions in the United States, Canada, Japan, and Taiwan.
He owns AcroEditions, which publishes and/or distributes multiple-original art. He was co-founder and artistic director of Collectors' Investment Fund.
He is the director of the Spring Arts Foundation; Utah Cultural Arts Foundation, and the Fine
Arts Legacy Foundation
Lawrence is an early-in-the-month home teacher, whose beat is by elevator. In addition, he has spent the past six years hosting and promoting reunions of the missionaries who served in the French Mission (France, Belgium, and Switzerland) during the decade after WWII.