Kokoschka The Ultimate Modernist by Rudiger Gorner,

 Kokoschka

The Ultimate Modernist by Rudiger Gorner, published by Haus Publishing, offers to the readers an important point of view regarding the brilliant, eccentric character that Oskar Kokoschka was. 

The author remembers that once he fell in love for his paintings but that later collected also press cuttings: it was true that Gorner remained bewitched by the extraordinary artist when at the Tate Gallery of New York was organized in 1986 an art exhibit of the artist. 

You must know that before to being the biographer of Kokoschka, Gorner wrote several other biographies, including the ones of Rilke and Trakl meeting in many ways Kokoschka in his writings. 

But who was mainly this genius? 

At first we can classify him as the biggest portraitist of the XX century. 

His paintings can be compared at Freud's couch, writes Gorner. 

Reading this book you'll understand that it is true. Kokoschka donated all himself because he was pervaded by strong feelings and sentiments and his pulsions, his romanticism, his visions of the existence was never connected just with the mere reality but with the big or little dramas of the moment.

Every experiences he lived, let's talk now of his experience as soldier during the First World War had a strong and intense internal resonance. 

Kokoschka was injured two times and once to the head; he returned home, but then he desired to return to fight in the battlefields; in the letters it is remarked this oscillation of thoughts; it depended maybe by the person he had in front of him,   the  blank page of a letter for his mother, or just the thoughts of the moment.

He was an artist of his time, Espressionist and Modernist, and lived all the big contradictions of a world in mutation. He was so original that once Einstein defined him: "A complicated talent." 

He was a genius. He could pass in fact through several mediums; writings, with his plays and essays, poems, but also paintings, and portraits who paid his bills when very young or that starved him a lot when people didn't like the way he had portrayed them and didn't want that paintings anymore without, of course, paying and leaving the painter penniless.

The existence of Kokoschka hasn't always been successful.

But... He loved to express himself giving with all his soul the reflection of his existence. He was "en route" as maybe was Rilke under other aspects, for all his existence. Kokoschka lived in many cities, for the most diversified reasons, but every city he lived in, his encounters, the atmosphere discovered in that environments created differentiations, new discoveries and a multiformity of richness that at least, paid a lot.

His last name: you will be curious of it: it means the cuckoo. He was born in 1886 in Pochlarn on the south bank of the Danube. 

Although he stayed there just a year he will idealized, as later he did with all the women of his existence, his birthplace. His father was from Prague where later Oskar will return several times for various years during his existence. His father was a travelling clock salesman for a local jewellery. 

When the family moved in Vienna where there were more opportunities of work there was a tragedy in the Kokoschka existence because the biggest brother of Oskar, died. 

Anyway the little Oskar loved the new atmosphere of Vienna. He was lucky enough of growing in a fertile environment meeting two teachers who believed in him and his biggest capacities. 

Kokoschka understood that years also the Japanese art of woodcutting, bewitched by this art. 

Although Vienna had given to him a lot later he didn't find anymore a good humus and decided to change air going to Berlin. Berlin meant to him a frenetic city and the possibility of enlarge the requests for portraits and new, important, collaborations. 

Although he later decided to return to Vienna, Berlin remains to him the best synthesis of his learning.

Speaking about his love, a big one was for Lilith. No one knew if Kokoschka was attracted by her or her Madonna-like face, or her skirt, or the red colors. It was an abrupt end; also pretty nasty, because  someone didn't speak too well of the genial Kokoschka at Lilith. The girl so, preferred to move on marrying someone else.

Alma Mahler will be his biggest love during the young adult existence. He will settle down seriously only in his maturity. Alma Mahler represented after Lilith the answers to all his desires. He imagined her as a an ideal feminine model. 

Lost for her, he inundated her of long and intense love-letters, poems, absolutely beautiful and sophisticated.

He wanted to elevate her relationship with Alma into the sacred . This love as writes the author was "about life and death". Alma was never in love with anyone, there is to precise it, so substantially she didn't never fall in love for Oskar, but of course she was intruigued by his court and under many ways, she appreciated him. 

A moon couple, Alma hided to everyone in Vienna her relationship with him;  they spent beautiful moments in Italy.

It was another tribulated relationship that ended leaving masterpieces in paintings like The Bride of the Wind, great homage to Alma. 

During the following years Oskar travelled a lot, and when he returned home in Vienna, he had again to leave the city because of an escalation of German power and the annexion of the city; he went to Prague but then it was necessary to leave Prague  we are in 1938 because of the same problems experienced in Vienna; from Prague he had to decide where to go. 

He didn't trust France, and Switzerland kept him perplexed. At the end he picked up London. 

In these years Kokoschka speaks of the absurd logic of inhumanity of the politic of power.

It wasn't a joke at first living in London; but then he was involved in various activities and created the painting dedicated to Prague called Nostalgia.

He preferred to travel when in UK for discovering Scotland and Cornwall, marrying also her latest love Olga Palkovskà on may 15th 1941. In the while Oskar continued his activity as activist. Not only: he was obsessed by the conditions lived by many children; it's important "to create a better world for children" wrote in a letter.

After the war in 1953 Oskar and his wife will start to live in Switzerland. He loved to be surrounded by creatives like musicians and in his house in Villeneuve, called Villa Delphin loved to organize private concerts.Kokoschka appreciated since his youth musicians and opera and he was a fanatic of Wagner and other important composers and sometimes  they influenced his paintings. 

Oskar's ideas about main thematics once the war over was a bit contradictory: a thematic he loved to spread was the sexualisation of culture seen negatively when some of his paintings demostrated erotic stimulation.

The last World War Conflict once over left of course many big fears: the end of the world with a third world war, Holocaust meant a wound that could not be healed; we can only remember and remember thanks to memory and direct witnesses. What happened in the mind of the creative? This strong impact meant a new research: faces but also mythological world. 

What motivated Oskar was a perception: the one that values were gone like also traditions. 

Kokoschka said once that he had four infatuations: "with people, with the work, with composition, with life." He thought at the option of the suicide but these four infatuations helped him to resist at that thoughts. 

Kokoschka decided to open at the Salzburg summer academy a "School of Seeing" a center for all the senses.

He was helped in this sense by Friederich Welz, inspirator and secretary of the academy.

Yes, this man Welz was part of the Nazi system during the war. It is still unclear if Oskar knew it or just removed these informations and accepted the new state of things.

We knew that there was a previous meetings between the two in 1934 because of an art gallery exhibit.

If Oskar didn't mind, surely Salzburg didn't want to have anything to do with this heavy past background. In a way or in another it was given the permissiona at the genius of organizing courses during the summer-time. The Committe of the Salzburg Summer Academy wanted to give their final words regarding teachers; Kokoschka as well so there were frequent frictions.

This school precised Oskar was indispensible because of the fruits producted by Nazists. So the motto of the school could be: OPEN YOUR OWN EYES!!!

In a letter he wrote: "Learning Seeing  and Insight was always at the beginning. All controversy, discord, all fracturing, in the history of Europe came about when they came with theories, not wishing to see what is there under the sun, which is the same regardless of its rising in the East and setting in the West."

Kokoschka classified him as a "seer" in an interview released in Austria once the second world war was over.

The world is seen as a sort of "a dirty nebula in the universe;" after two world wars, a pandemic flu, the spanish one  with 100 million lost souls.

Which is the legacy left by Kokoscjka who disappeared in 1980?

He is with his art everywhere: Venice, Boston, London, Vienna. Very loved and estimated in Italy he is studied in particular in Florence, Venice, and Rome.

Kokoschka is the alternative Picasso. He considered the spanish painter pretty superficial.  Picasso in first person tried thanks to a common mutual friend of sending him a postcard with a dove for making peace; Oskar didn't change his mind: in the while new generations are following his steps and what he has left behind.

I found this biography articulated, magnificient, beautiful and captivating. 

You must read it! You'll love it.

I thank Haus Paublishing for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori