Famous Austrians VIII: Oskar Kokoschka

Woman with Parrot

The Expressionist painter and playwright Oskar Kokoschka was born in Pöchlarn, Lower Austria, in 1886 and is known outside Austria mostly for his portraits and landscapes, and sometimes for his affair with composer Gustav Mahler's wife Alma.


Kokoschka's family moved to Vienna when he was a boy, and while in school, he began to paint, developing an interest in the works of Van Gogh. He also emulated the Jugendstil (art nouveau) styles. He served in the Austrian army during World War I and wounded by a bayonette stuck into his lung while on the Ukranian front. In the hospital, doctors decided he was mentally unstable. When he was dismissed from the army in 1916, he traveled around Europe to continue painting, landing in Dresden in 1917. 

Dresden Neustadt

In 1931 he came back to Vienna, only to move to Prague in 1934 to escape the Nazis (he was considered a degenerate artist, an entartete Künstler by the regime). In 1938, when Hitler came to the Czech Republic, Kokoschka moved to London, where he was an active member of Young Austria, a group of exiled Austrians living in England and waiting out the the end of World War II. 


After the war, Kokoschka made it to Switzerland, where he lived out the rest of his life. The Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna (close to my apartment, actually!) has a permanent exhibit of his work.

Although he's oft-copied in Vienna (not as much as Klimt, dear God), I really enjoy Kokoschka's paintings for their bright colors and quasi-dreamscapes. Similar to my feelings about the Blaue Reiter, I think I will have to snag Franz Marc's comment about art being a continuation of our dreams. Just paraphrasing.

KUNSTHALLE: Le Surréalisme, c'est moi!

An exhibit at the Kunsthalle, and one I was very excited about seeing, Le Surréalisme, c'est moi! was, I'll be honest, a bit disappointing.

I would consider myself a true Salvador Dali fan. I have seen lots of exhibitions. I even have a finger puppet Dali:

Dali in front of the Trevi Fountain

So I was disappointed to see only a handful of Dali originals, with the rest of the exhibit a painful "contemporary artist do Dali." Yuck. This is a) false advertizing. I expected DALI! and b) not real art if you are just copy catting a great artist.

I did however receive a dual entrance ticket for my €10.50 to see "Das Kabinett des Jan Svankmajer" exhibit on the floor above. I was highly impressed. Svankmajer is a relatively well-known Czech animator and film director. He dabbles in other art forms, but his most famous pieces are short films. I remember seeing Dimensions of Dialogue at some point on TV - maybe the arts channel...here is a link to the first part on YouTube. I remember distinctly the different heads devouring each other, and thought it was weird when I was about 15. But now I find it strangely beautiful. I found the entire exhibit beautiful, in fact. Sometime a bit creepy, but always a true artistic vision.

Svankmajer's Encyclopedia sketches

Svankmajer has been touted as the Czech Tim Burton (though his work predates Burton's, so I would say he inspired Burton). As more or less a contemporary of Ingmar Bergman, I would also compare him to Bergman, in the sense that his films deal with social issues in a surreal or unexpected context. Although Bergman's work is more or less "normal" (set in a contemporary, real-life world) and live-action (no animation), I think they share a conceptual vision, in a way.

Svankmajer's work is dark - no doubt about that - imaginative, and very much influenced by the culture of central Europe. I've noticed in my time here (and in reading plenty of German texts in college) that there is a bit of an obsession with the Devil in German, Bohemian, and Alpine cultures - just look at the Brothers Grimm! Or Kafka, or E.T.A Hoffmann, or Heine. Or basically any German-language author for that matter. His Kafka-esque "The Flat," revamping of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," and his haunting critique of Communism, "The Garden."

So, although the Dali part was a bust, I think I've found a new favorite cineaste in Svankmajer.

Famous Austrians VII: Lisette Model

San Francisco, Lisette Model, 1949

Born Elise Amelie Felicie Stern in Vienna in 1901, Lisette Model is one of the most iconic women photographers of the 20th century. She moved from Vienna to Nice as a young girl, and then to Paris to study music in 1926. She later switched her focus to painting and photography and moved to New York with her husband in 1938. To earn a living at first, she worked as a staff photographer for Harper's Bazaar. In the 1950s, she taught photography at the New School in New York. Among her pupils was a young Diane Arbus.

Coney Island, New York, 1941, Lisette Model

Her work is evocative of a need for questioning human motives, society, and in many cases the lives of those on the social fringe in the 1940's and 1950's when Model was at the height of her fecundity. Divorcees, the obese, old people were all considered viable, and worthy, photographic subjects - which can be seen taken to an even further extreme in Arbus' works. Her street scenes and night life photographs are also famous and enduring. The human form, in all its intricacies: beauty, reality of form and figure, necessity of limbs and movement, at once familiarity and strangeness.

Reflections, New York, 1939, Lisette Model

Model died in 1983, but her work lives on. A particularly good  permanent exhibit of her work is at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.  There are also pieces at the MoMA in New York and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. 

Bank Austria Does Frida Kahlo

Several weeks ago...before I even went to Prague...I went to the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Kunstforum in Vienna.

I greatly enjoy Frida Kahlo, as a woman and an artist. Unquestionably, she had genius qualities. I was very impressed by the whole collection, and found out a lot about Frida - I mean, more than I learned from the Salma Hayek movie. Although Salma was great - very artistically driven and all, but I could not help feeling it was a bit...one-sided?

Like, for example, why the heck did Frida do so many self-portraits? What is the art historian's perspective on this? Something like, art reflects life, life is fragile and subjective and the duty of the artist is to find the greatest artistic expression in some sort of muse...subject...whatever.

My uncultured perspective is that she is a self-important brat who thinks the greatest artistic expression is found in herself. Why go any farther in seeking truth and beauty when the mirror is only steps away? And just as good (i.e. better) than the "traditional" muse.

And, yeah she had a crappy life...like sustaining major injuries in a bus accident when she was 18 (and being plagued by these same injuries for the rest of her life), marrying a man 20 years her senior who was unfaithful to her, and putting her faith in Communism...which may or may not have been a disappointment for her (I have no way of knowing, but considering how faith in Communism normally works out for people...)

But think of all of the positive things that happened to her! She became famous and successful within her lifetime, which is incredibly difficult for any (serious) artist. She is still regarded as one of the leading (and few female) surrealist painters, and even though her husband had lots of affairs and hurt her, she had plenty of affairs herself - with some pretty heavy-duty characters! Which, of course, is not cool. That's nothing I condone. But, still...when you got it...?

This makes me wonder, when good things happen to you, must they be regulated by bad things happening as well? Are any of us free to live our lives, or is there a greater force beyond what we know? Frida would certainly not believe in a higher force...or any higher power at all, if she was a true Trotskyist (maybe she just slept with him without seriously considering his ideas...) but perhaps this would have helped her frame of mind.