Art: Saints and Demons

The most degenerate of all degenerate European artists (according to Hitler) is having his biggest exhibition in the U.S. A one-man show of Czech Oskar Kokoschka opened last week in Manhattan’s Buchholz Gallery—full of pictures of the Freudian subconscious which Nazi officials have condemned and exiled as politically dangerous.

Kokoschka, a high priest of Europe’s Expressionist school, paints and draws with desperate passion eerie, flayed-looking nudes, wild-eyed portrait sitters, muddily fantastic landscapes, grotesque figures of saints and demons done in coarse, guttural lines and screaming colors. To connoisseurs, his brooding fantasies are as exciting as the paintings of the Expressionists’ idol, Vincent van Gogh.

Kokoschka got his first important art training as an architectural designer in Vienna working under famed modern Architect Adolf Loos. In his spare time he painted tortured portraits of his Viennese friends. For his grim portraits and angrily smudged landscapes, collectors paid as high as $8,000. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, Expressionist Kokoschka, caught in Prague, flew to England.

Today Expressionist Kokoschka lives near London where he paints, writes and thrashes out world problems with a group of refugee intellectuals. From his English patrons, he still gets £300 a canvas.

Moody, restless and erratic, Painter Kokoschka continually complains that he can’t find attractive women models who have souls. Once in the early ’20s, Painter Kokcschka was so discouraged trying to find a woman he liked that he commissioned a manufacturer to make him a life-size doll, giving exact specifications as to form, color of hair, eyes, etc. When the doll arrived, Expressionist Kokoschka was so disappointed he took it out into the back yard and burned it, meanwhile fending off a squad of policemen who were convinced he was removing traces of a murder.