There are plenty of contemporary sources for the sentimental esthetic of Oskar Kokoschka. I look at him now mostly as a curiosity, or as a source of clues toward a reading of the new wave of expressionist painters gaining favor in Europe and America. Kokoschka has always found champions among those critics who love to croon magic words like “evocative,” “expressive,” “emotionality,” and “experiential,” but the sad truth is that, despite intentions, he never was much of a painter. His early work is little more than an emaciated pastiche of Art Nouveau, while his later years were given over to a rather uninspired realism given a veneer of modernist respectability through the manipulation of thickish paint. He did manage to produce a few acceptable paintings, but nothing in his output even begins to suggest why he was reviled by some as a monster of modernity, and hailed by others as a wild hero of advanced culture.
So how did someone whose work now looks safe and convention bound become so successful as an avant-garde artist? Mostly as a result of a sophisticated manipulation of attitude. Kokoschka grasped early on that the modern artist’s great gift is his own self, and that a carefully presented image of that self will guarantee a following among the small public that enjoys the frisson of dangerous-seeming ideas but does not want to be bothered to actually think about them.
Kokoschka’s act was hugely successful. He came on as a confused soul—unable to cope with daily reality, terrified of female sexuality, but somehow in touch with a higher truth. He suffered nobly, and as a result was certified a great artist. The presentation was confrontational; a direct, unmediated attack on conventions of behavior, an emptying of distance, a transgression of custom. But this was a rebellion kept safely within bounds, expressed in unsurprising, conventional modes.
Of course this kind of manipulation can be interesting, if done consciously. But Kokoschka believed in what he was doing, and believed with a passion; he was utterly sincere in his banal egocentrism. As a result, the bulk of his paintings are indistinguishable from one another. The subjects of his portraits are reduced to tortured look-alikes, wriggling uncomfortably under the constraints of his feverishly mannered line. The landscapes are uniform, almost regimented in their similarities; Kokoschka traveled all over the place, yet managed to make everywhere look the same, since he simply had no interest in representing anything but his own feelings.
—Thomas Lawson
