“Maybe Schiele, but not Klimt, Kokoschka yes, Gerstl no.” Reger, the first-person narrator of Thomas Bernhard’s novel “Alte Meister” (Old Masters), first gives his verdict on the greatness of Austrian artists of the twentieth century, and then promptly becomes more detailed : “There have been several Austrian painters of the quality of Schiele in this century, but apart from Kokoschka not a single really important, really great, so to speak.”
As Bernhard himself was well known, official Austria and Austrian art historiography saw things differently. To this day, Kokoschka is represented in the country’s public collections and in art historical accounts, mostly in third place behind his esteemed mentor Gustav Klimt and the envied, sometimes brutally abused colleague Egon Schiele.
Nobody knows this better than Bernadette Reinhold, author of numerous studies and editor of relevant anthologies about the painter, who has headed the Oskar-Kokoschka Center at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna since 2008. However, this unusually conceived biography is not about correcting an already problematic hierarchy, but about settling accounts with homo politicus and his love-hate relationship with his home country.
The “facets” of the subtitle hardly do justice to the broad arc that this ambitious study tries to draw – from the explosive beginnings, which polarized the art world of Vienna, with the Kunstschau 1908 and the Internationale Kunstschau 1909, to military service and participation in propaganda initiatives in the First World War, the hitherto little-known rapprochement with the Austro-fascist “corporate state” and anti-fascist commitment in Prague and England to hesitant participation in Austria’s increasingly conservative cultural policy after 1945.
He saw himself as a victim
The thoroughly researched core of the book examines the changing relationships of the years 1945 to 1955 between the Second Republic and its lost son, who since 1947 has not been Austrian but rather British. Using personal files, minutes of meetings and other archive materials as well as correspondence and reports from contemporaries, Reinhold tells a mostly unknown, ultimately sad story of rapprochement and alienation. Despite intrigues by envious, former Nazi painter colleagues and other opponents, politicians and museum officials tried to win over the once militantly anti-fascist artist. They wanted to organize exhibitions for him, get commissions, secure professorships, bestow honors and, above all, convince him to accept Austrian citizenship again.
Bernadette Reinhold: “Oskar Kokoschka and Austria”. Facets of a political biography.
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Image: Böhlau Verlag
Individual episodes look like scenes in a Nestroy farce. At a city council meeting in 1946, objections were raised to the granting of honorary citizenship by the city of Vienna, arguing that the sixty-year-old painter should first be seventy and that he was also a foreigner. One of the mishaps in attempts to augment the meager holdings of the oeuvre in public collections was the acquisition of an impressive early portrait for the Austrian Gallery, which turned out to be the work of Max Oppenheimer, who had been prosecuted as a plagiarist even before 1914.