The Civilised Magic of Oskar Kokoschka

This year is an appropriate one to recall the work of the artist and playwright Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980). It is one hundred years since his return, from Berlin and his activity with the avant-garde magazine Der Sturm, to Vienna. There he met Alma Mahler, recent widow of the composer. A tempestuous love affair ensued, which ended definitively when, on August 29, 1915, as a dragoon in the Austro-Hungarian army, Kokoschka was shot in the head by machine gun, then bayoneted in one lung and left to die, by Russian forces on the Eastern Front. Remarkably, he survived; but Alma Mahler, having seen a Viennese newspaper reporting him as dead, promptly called at his studio and removed all her letters to him and a considerable number of his drawings, which she later gave or sold to younger men of her acquaintance.

Kokoschka’s affair with the widow Mahler (she later re-married twice, in the first instance to the architect Walter Gropius) has been a curious and unfortunate feature of the large body of literature on him and his work. He was so obsessed by her that he had made a life-size doll in her image for him to use (briefly) as a model. Until it was destroyed in the course of a rowdy party held by the artist for his friends, this mannequin-fetish featured in some of his paintings. However, the affair with Alma Mahler, although productive of some few great works, such as The Bride of the Wind and Double Portrait, is perhaps the least interesting aspect of his remarkable life and works. For a time, scholarship on Gustav Mahler, who died in 1911, was fascinated by Alma’s recollections—and she lived on until 1964—but gradually her foibles and her unreliability as keeper of that particular flame led critics to be very wary of her.

Of much more interest and moment are the character, abilities and artistic achievements of Oskar Kokoschka himself, as expressed in his pictorial and graphic works and in his literary work including his poems, his plays and his autobiography My Life (1971). Indeed, it was justly said of him by Richard Calvocoressi that, even without his important place in the “modernist” canon of Western European art, the events of Kokoschka’s long and colourful life would be worthy of study.[1] Never mind Alma Mahler and the doll; while in Sweden receiving medical treatment towards the end of the First World War, he was briefly enamoured of the woman who later became Hermann Goering’s first wife.

At the outset, it is important to note that although the art-historical tag “German Expressionist” is often applied to him, that is largely for the sake of critical convenience or short-hand. Although some of his work is often dark and challenging in the manner of much German Expressionism, many of Kokoschka’s great works are full of light and an extraordinary and uplifting breadth of vision. This is especially true of his aerial landscape views of great European cities such as Prague, Paris and London and his other travel pictures.

As well, Kokoschka explicitly distanced himself from Abstract Expressionism and the Non-Objective avant-garde in general; and his life experiences, as we shall see, led him to a notably robust rejection of all forms of political correctness, whether of the Nazi or the Comintern varieties. Particularly in later life (but not only then) he tenaciously adhered to the fundamentals of the Western tradition in pictorial art and to its Grecian roots. He was not (despite being described by some pre-1914 critics as the “wild child” of art) merely a figure of the enfant terrible kind; he was a broadly and deeply cultured man, who had taught in various art academies after the First World War. This aspect of Kokoschka is today often overlooked, and he tends to be lumped in as part of a famous trio with those other major Austrian artists Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. For many, Kokoschka is just another of the “Weimar period” artists. He was much more than that, despite being branded in 1937 as one of the “Degenerate Artists” by the Nazi cultural commissars headed by Josef Goebbels. Nor, as we shall see, is Oskar Kokoschka’s development as critical commentator on the so-called Zeitgeist of modernity simply to be explained as the usual artistic trajectory of the declension from a spiky, radical youth through to a milder, conservative and traditionalist old age. Kokoschka’s career reveals a remarkably strong integrity.

As an adjunct to this article and for readers whose familiarity with Kokoschka is limited, I can recommend the vivid and arresting presentation of a gallery of his pictures, enlivened by a shimmering musical background, which is available on YouTube at  www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHYfjYhp9i0. It is very good indeed and it shows a selection of works of the various kinds which I shall mention here.

This is not the place for a full discussion of Kokoschka’s remarkable life story, nor for a catalogue of his pictures and the graphic and dramatic works. Already at the time of Hans Wingler’s magisterial book on the artist, first published in 1956 in German and in English in 1958,[2] the volume of literature upon Kokoschka was enormous, both in terms of monographs and numerous articles and notices in scholarly journals and exhibition and critical notes in other periodicals. As well, Kokoschka himself had published a large number of articles on artistic and cultural matters, particularly before 1938. Interested readers may pursue their own researches, starting with the sources in Wingler and as collected in more recent monographs on Kokoschka. Hence, instead of attempting any grand survey of the artist’s oeuvre and significance in art history, this article has the more modest aim of recalling to notice the essential features of Oskar Kokoschka’s work and his special place in the cultural history of the twentieth century. As well, an attempt is made to get at the true nature of the message Kokoschka was trying to convey to a world obsessed with both the conflict of ideologies and the increasing mechanisation of human existence. 

Born at Poechlarn in the then Austro-Hungarian empire in 1886, Kokoschka grew up in a loving lower middle-class family. His father, once a craftsman goldsmith, had been forced by an economic collapse in the empire to become a salesman in order to survive. Oscar entered the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts to train not merely as an artist, but also as an art historian; so he received both a sound technical training in traditional representational art and also the wider cultural and scholarly perspective. This was partly due to his father’s concern that he should at least have an income from teaching, and not rely just on painting. He became very active in Viennese artistic circles from about 1907, and attracted attention with his strongly expressionistic essays in portraiture. In 1908 his dramatic work for the stage Moerder Hoffnung des Frauen (Murder, Hope of Women) created a furore which required police attendance at the theatre.

His paintings also attracted criticism and often, even defacement. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, no less, said after seeing his works, that “this young man deserves to have every bone in his body broken”. Ironically, that is very much like what happened to Kokoschka when he was wounded in 1915 while serving loyally as a dragoon in the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian empire. After a long and painful series of treatments, he slowly recovered from his war wounds and recommenced his teaching, painting and graphic work.

In the 1920s and the early 1930s, he travelled extensively throughout Europe and around the Mediterranean, producing wherever he went so many stunning landscapes and city views (as well as some notable portraits, such as the Marabout of Temacine) that some critics labelled him the “Cook’s tour painter”.[3] After activity in Berlin, Paris and Vienna, by 1934 he was in Prague. He was increasingly concerned about what he saw clearly as the ultimate consequences of Nazism; and he became so courageously outspoken that not only were his works confiscated by the Nazi thugs and exhibited in Munich as “Degenerate Art”, but also, after the Anschluss, it was clear his life was also in danger.[4]

Having earlier obtained Czech citizenship, he and Olda Palkovska, a graduate lawyer and art historian, managed to flee Prague by air in 1938 and went to London, where they joined the many other cultural refugees there from the Nazification of Europe. Kokoschka painted in London, Cornwall and Scotland during the war years.[5] He and Olda married in 1941, in a registry office temporarily located in an air raid shelter. In 1947, he took British nationality and later revisited Europe. In 1953, he and Olda built a home with studio in Villeneuve, near Montreux in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland, and Kokoschka painted, wrote and did graphic work there and elsewhere until his death in 1980 at the age of ninety-three. He received the German Order for Merit in 1956 and was made a CBE in 1961. 

It is against that background that one must approach Kokoschka’s works. It is also against those antecedents that one must consider his pronouncements on the growing cultural crisis, not only in the West, but of the modern world as such. His surviving brother and sister in Vienna and Prague suffered during the war years and under communist rule. Kokoschka, always concerned for them, bravely visited them and in vain sought to enable his sister to come to the West.

Many people regard Kokoschka as just another of the Expressionists and hence simply as an “anti-establishment” figure of the 1920s and 1930s. True, he did shock the peculiar and rather precious worlds of pre-1914 and interwar Vienna and Berlin. The angularity and directness of his style consciously avoided the “Arabesque” line and ornamentations of the Art Nouveau and the Jugendstil. However, it will not do to pigeonhole him as just another noisy and revolutionary Austrian Expressionist. His life and art were deeply rooted in the world of the old Danubian monarchy, which was destroyed in 1918. Unlike many others, who were soi-disant cultural activists in the 1920s, he had served honourably in the Great War and was a decorated and wounded veteran. He came of a Catholic background; and although not especially devout in his practice, he never really abandoned the Catholic faith.

The overt religious themes in many of his works are especially telling;[6] so much so that it is fair to say that it is ultimately a Catholic outlook which informs his critical views of various tendencies in the modern world. Indeed, it is likely that his explicit appeal to certain Catholic tropes in a letter published by the Frankfurter Zeitung in support of his colleague the leading Jewish artist Max Liebermann, and against the growing Nazi persecution, was precisely what triggered Kokoschka’s inclusion in the Nazis’ lengthy artistic hate list of 1937. Kokoschka had written:

we also know that, however great our involvement with a national identity, the root which draws nourishment and strength from eternal human values must not be allowed to wither, but must continue to govern our growth and give us our crown of leaves. Let us not forget that all Fatherlands are rooted in the lap of Mother Earth. Not pyres but beacons of joy should be kindled in honour of the divine mother, to whom the ear of grain, the vine and the rose are consecrated.

One notes here his explicit rejection of the neo-pagan bonfires as lit by the Nazis, not only by way of their ritual book-burnings, but in their other pseudo-Nordic ceremonial contexts. The Nazis could not abide references to any supranational values or institutions. It was Alma Mahler’s abortion of their unborn child which destroyed Kokoschka’s relationship with her. Reflecting upon this period, he later wrote: “It is wrong to cut short the process of life merely from indolence … one must keep awake to the meaning of life.”[7]

Some commentators—both the Nazis (who had exhibited his self-portrait next to a photograph of a victim of mental illness) and the radical avant-gardists (who in the postwar years often sought to dismiss or to marginalise him as old-fashioned)—liked to emphasise his war injuries and his slow physical and mental recovery after the war. When the Nazis labelled him a “Degenerate Artist” along with many others at their Munich Exhibition in 1937, this was not a new appellation—it had been used by the more conservative of his Viennese critics earlier. Yet, how debased an act this was from the National Socialists: for a reptile like Goebbels to so attack the pictorial art of a wounded and decorated war veteran like Kokoschka. The Nazi attack on “Degenerate Art” was indeed not only anti-Semitic (for many of the artists so attacked were Jewish) but it also sprang from the anodyne banality in art favoured by Hitler and his Party. Kokoschka later recalled that in his Vienna days he had won a certain art scholarship and that the disappointed runner-up had been Adolf Hitler. That may well explain Goebbels’s inclusion of Kokoschka in 1937.[8] 

Despite his lucky escape from Prague, Kokoschka was downcast during the Second World War, and in the postwar period he remained anxious about his sister in Prague and his brother in Vienna. He grew increasingly dismayed by world trends. Some commentators spoke of him as “embittered” and “marginalised” in his later decades. Yet these were the years of his greatest works of all—the panels for the triptych The Legend of Prometheus (1950) commissioned by Count Antoine Seilern for his residence at Princes Gate in London (now part of the Courtauld Collection)[9] and his other major triptych commission, the Thermopylae (1954) painted for the University of Hamburg. Both these works give expression to a central preoccupation in Kokoschka’s work and thought in his middle to old age: the danger to humanity of a world which increasingly abandons genuine civilisation in its traditional sense, for the mere simulacrum or substitute of not merely large reliance upon, but virtual obeisance to, the technological and mechanical arts, combined with a related obsession with speed and an illusory “efficiency”, as ends in themselves. 

Although always kindly to his students and sympathetic to the young in general, Kokoschka explicitly distanced himself from the 1970s “counterculture”, just as he had distanced himself from the Romantic wastrels of the early twentieth-century Germanic youth movements:

I am not a follower of fashion; I ignored the artistic modes of my own day, such as Analytical Cubism, at a time when everyone wanted to paint Cezannian dissections of guitars. All that is past. Today it merely reminds me of the obnoxious guitar-strumming of the Wandervogel movement during the Jugendstil years. That too was a form of escapism, like that of the transistor-toting hippies whose dope ampoules foul the ruins of the Acropolis …

I do not share the disillusionment of my contemporaries—especially the artists—who subscribe to the fashionable idea that existence is in itself absurd. I do not make collages out of the detritus of industrial life—although this no doubt provides a very appropriate reflection of our age. I am more like the Romans, saving their household gods from a burning house …[10]

Not for Kokoschka the unredeemable spectacle of the “Pied Piper of Hamelin” pose into which some notorious German and Austrian émigrés, especially in the United States, settled, in and after that dreadful and watershed year of 1968. As Kokoschka, amongst others, was more than well aware, the events of that year had their origins in other disastrous changes in the West (particularly in major centres of its tradition) during the early 1960s. He was not likely to be minded to join in the headlong rush to dismantle that tradition. For he had seen it all before; and as emanating from both the Left and the Right.

Kokoschka was no “babe in the woods”, nor any sentimentalist, when it came to his sharpest political insights. He did not need the volumes of solid Germanic scholarship (for example, Dr Fritz Fischer’s researches, as undoubtedly valuable and necessary though they were to make the point for posterity) in order to conclude, as Kokoschka does in My Life, that “The habit of obedience had taken root in Germany in the Wilhelmine period”.[11] For he had been there then; and he had lain wounded and left for dead on the Eastern Front. It is again that long perspective which gives his considered views and conclusions peculiar force. He had been reviled by stuffy Viennese critics before 1914; but after 1918, he was pilloried by radical leftist artists, such as the communist George Grosz, whose group publicly derided Kokoschka as Die Kunsthure (The Art Whore) and as to be hanged “from the nearest lamppost when their party came to power”. [12]

No wonder then that in his essay “Picture, Speech and Writing”, Kokoschka wrote:

The number of catchwords is constantly on the increase: freedom, progress, modern, reactionary, ideology, system … “The majority decides,” “science has proved,” “history has taught us,” “technical progress has worked wonders,” “the facts speak for themselves”: these and similar catchphrases abound. The abominable and the absurd have become fellow travellers. [He instanced the Nazis’ euphemism Gleichschaltung (“co-ordination”)] Thought has become impoverished; the capacity to call things by their names is fading out. This [may explain] the [modern] favoured practice of calling social, economic, administrative and political institutions by their initials instead of by their names. [13]

This practice has only intensified in the contemporary world; now, even statutes bear titles that advocate a “line” instead of simply naming a subject. 

Kokoschka’s career as a painter spanned more than sixty years, from about 1909. His works therefore display some distinct changes and embody a surprisingly wide range of “styles”. Like many other professional artists who have painted in a sustained way and have developed over decades, his works can to a certain extent, but not exclusively, be divided into a succession of periods. As Ludwig Goldscheider[14] has indicated, these may be broadly described or termed as follows: early graphics and oils, the interwar travel pictures and views, the mature works, and the late works. Sir Ernst Gombrich noted that what Kokoschka, in the Vienna Sezession days, had “violently rejected was the dandyism of the Beardsley period, the reliance on calligraphic chic and self-conscious stylishness … Kokoschka has preferred the robust to the refined”.[15]

Overall, the striking thing about Kokoschka’s output is that it is largely in the three main traditional modes in Western painting: landscapes, portraiture and allegorical subjects. He remained always and emphatically a representationalist; and he outspokenly rejected non-objective art as being anti-humane. Thus, one can divide up his main body of pictorial work (the paintings, graphic work for the press, and drawings) by examining it in those three modes.

The portraits in particular reveal an ability, observed in many of the best portraitists, to “get beneath the skin” of the sitter and to bring out or express the essence of the sitter’s personality. And not only that; many critics and other observers (including those who knew him well) have pointed out that Kokoschka seemed also to possess what might almost be described as a faculty of “second sight” in this regard, which they note enabled him to paint a sitter not only as the sitter essentially appeared at the time, but also to express something of what the sitter’s appearance would later come to be. One observer called it the “Dorian Gray” effect[16]; but of course it is not quite that. In an interview on Kokoschka, his old friend in London, Ernst Gombrich, remarked upon this kind of faculty and said that whilst Kokoschka sometimes spoke of himself being conscious of such a “clairvoyance”, it was not really any matter of mystery or the “mystic”, but simply that Kokoschka possessed what Gombrich has called a great and deep natural capacity for “human sympathy” with his sitters.[17]

Many of Kokoschka’s early portraits are challenging and overtly “psychological”. Examples include his depictions of Count Verona and August Forel, amongst others. However, with the portrait of the Czech leader Thomas Masaryk (1935), there emerges a new style of portrait which he largely retains thereafter: in, for example, his portraits of Konrad Adenauer, Theodor Korner, Pablo Casals and Agatha Christie. The Masaryk picture includes an image in homage to Jan Amos Comenius, the Moravian scholar whose concept of “education through visual contemplation” (as laid out in his Orbis Pictus) was a lifelong enthusiasm of Kokoschka’s. He did many self-portraits (notably his Self–Portrait of a Degenerate Artist in 1937) and several portraits of Olda Palkovska in oils and in pencil, as well as double portraits of himself and Olda at various later periods. He painted his Portrait of Cardinal dalla Costa in Italy in 1948; and one newspaper report [18] spoke of him being about to portray Pius XII, but this does not seem to have eventuated, in what Wingler calls a year of “extraordinary productivity”.[19]

The sitter for one of Kokoschka’s most remarkable portraits, Mrs Pamela Hodin, wife of the art historian and friend of the artist Dr Paul Hodin, has recorded her memories of the sittings:

It was a wonderful experience to be painted by Kokoschka, when I was forty-two. He liked his sitters to talk … and to make you animated, he sometimes asked Olda to read something that he thought would inspire you. In this case, he asked her to read from Euripides, The Bacchae … because they were the followers of Dionysus and they would go up into the mountains and dance … a very happy, happy work … and he laughed a lot at all their frolics … But it wasn’t like an orgy, it was a sort of ritual dance … and Olda read beautifully … He liked emotions controlled by ritual… So he said, “That will make you relaxed” … We laughed a lot and it was a sort of sunshiny experience … He had known me a very long time and we had spoken together a lot … but it was very interesting, that when he did the portrait, how he always wanted to fill your mind with something other than yourself … so that you had lively thoughts. He gets your character … and he gets something that you grow into. I remember when he finished he said: “There you are … try to be like it” … which I have, really, ever since … He liked you to move around and to talk and you know, you didn’t have to sit statically at all.[20]

This recollection is a delightful document in itself and it gives a telling insight into both Kokoschka’s working methods and also his artistic intentions, as expressed in his portraiture, which is always full of character. 

Kokoschka’s widow Olda, when interviewed in the late 1980s, noted that his major landscapes are both panoramic and also “compositional”—that is to say, they are not merely transcriptions of “views” which might be as seen in an ordinary flat photograph taken from a single point, but they present an aspect that is wider than any one viewpoint and take in sweeping views beyond 180 degrees. She noted that Kokoschka was not interested in doing mere “genre paintings” of street-scenes or the like, simply as observed here and there. Rather, he liked to paint views or landscapes of a sweeping nature and as observed from elevated points such as from the windows of tall buildings (or later, as in London and New York, from the newer skyscrapers) or from mountainsides or high hills. She said that this was because, (as in fact Kokoschka explicitly affirmed in his autobiography), after his experiences of seeing trench warfare on the Eastern Front, he always wanted to contemplate the world from elevated places and not from low or flat ground.[21] One might say this betrayed a Nietzschean streak in him; but it is more appropriate to call it a preference for an “Olympian” view of the world, yet not in the pejorative sense as used today.

It may also have had something to do with Kokoschka’s tall, impressive and upright build. This was accompanied by a strong and lively personality that embodied the unusual combination of wide cultural interests and a deep intellect with, at the same time, an infinitely gentle and charming disposition, rather than any of the overbearing nature which so often comes with great talents, intellectual or otherwise. Indeed, photographs of Kokoschka in his middle and old age bear strong resemblances to some famous near contemporaries of his, such as the formidable German conductor Hans Knappertsbusch, or the English (later American) poet W.H. Auden. Kokoschka’s wide cultural interests extended to music, the opera, poetry and drama; and those aspects of Kokoschka and his other works would require a separate study in themselves. He was a friend of Furtwangler and he designed opera sets for Mozart’s The Magic Flute both for a production at Salzburg in the 1950s and elsewhere later. It is notable that Furtwangler “was present, silently watching” whilst Kokoschka painted his Thermopylae triptych for Hamburg University. [22]

If one may fairly say that many (but by no means all) of his portrait works are “dark” or embody nervous foreboding or angst, then most of his landscapes are quite otherwise. Many of them display an aerial lightness that is at once both astonishing to the eye and uplifting to the spirit. A lot of them (and one thinks here particularly of the English and especially the Scottish landscapes) also show a vivid but carefully controlled use of colour, which can often remind one of the techniques of the “Scottish Colourists” school. Yet of course, his colour work also reflects to a great extent the practice of the French Fauves and the kindred approach taken by the Germanic Blaue Reiter group. Indeed a vivid blue is frequently used by Kokoschka in his landscapes. Wingler notes blue as Kokoschka’s “favourite” colour, even though it does not appear in every one of his paintings.[23] Examples of where he uses blue to great painterly effect include the famous View of Richmond Terrace, London (1926) (sold in 2003 in New York for US$960,000) and View of the City of Vienna from the Wilhelminenberg (1931). In both of these bright and optimistic landscape views, Kokoschka employs, at many places across the canvases, strokes of vivid blue, often a cerulean blue, or sometimes a sapphire or cobalt blue, which in combination with his other colours (and particularly the greens) produce an effect that can best be described as “opalescent”— not in the milky, swirling fashion that word is often taken to mean, but rather as when one looks deep into the blue, green and red flecks to be seen in the best kind of fire opals. Indeed, the late collector Lord Croft, who at the age of twenty-two sat for one of the earliest portraits Kokoschka painted in London, has recounted that Kokoschka explained to him that his painting (from memory) of the city of Prague (Praha: Nostalgia, 1938) was done as if he had observed the essence of that city through or encased “in a piece of crystal”. [24]

Kokoschka’s allegorical works had their origins in some of his incisive graphic and poster works in the years of Der Sturm magazine. They reached a more developed and mature style in his “satirico-political” allegories of the early 1940s, such as The Red Egg (1941) and his Anschluss: Alice in Wonderland (1942) painted in London after his flight from Prague; and in his later poster works. However, it is the allegorical late works, particularly the two large triptych works The Legend of Prometheus and the Thermopylae, which are really Kokoschka’s masterworks. These, as well as some other major oils such as Herodotus, contain his vibrant colour work, controlled by a compositional structure that reminds us of the strong twin influences upon Kokoschka’s work of the Austrian Baroque tradition and classical (especially the Grecian) sources.

For now, a concluding note should come from a great, subtle and discerning German observer of the good, the bad and the downright evil in the Europe of the 1930s. In November 1933, Thomas Mann wrote of Oskar Kokoschka that he “seemed to me to be the embodiment of modern art … Civilised magic … that … is the essence of Kokoschka’s pictures”[25]. Mann too, ultimately had to flee Nazism. 

It is a pity that (at least so far as I have been able to discover), Kokoschka, although he was such a truly towering figure in the history of the art of the twentieth century, is represented very scantily in public gallery collections in Australia. Indeed, there are, it seems, no paintings of his in any of our public collections; and his representation is limited to just a selection of (comparatively lesser) drawings and graphic works. Meanwhile, the powers that be in Australia have readily parted with large sums to purchase paintings by New York School Abstract Expressionists and other international art. They have their due place, but really Oskar Kokoschka’s works have an equal, if not more significant, standing within the modernist canon.[26] Indeed, given his wider cultural criticisms of modernity and its evils and its ills, that standing is perhaps even more important than many people are aware of. Yet then, that may well be precisely why he has been, comparatively, rather ignored here. While much has been made, in Australian cultural history, of the iconoclasts of the Fauve and Expressionist movements and their effect on the artistic styles of Australian Modernists, once the influence is merely noted or identified, our traditional insularity tends to revert to a focus upon the Australian exponents of a style, and to an oblivion of interest in the relevant European precursors. This generally has been the experience with Oskar Kokoschka and his works; although Ronald Millar used Mann’s terms “Civilised Magic” in the short title of his 1974 book.[27]

There have been some honourable exceptions, at least amongst our Australian artists. In her book on Arthur Boyd, the late Dr Ursula Hoff noted that Boyd met Kokoschka in London during the 1960s and that in his painting entitled Seated Nebuchadnezzar and Crying Lion (1966–69) Boyd depicts, and clearly by way of homage, the King with “the features of the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka”.[28] The late Adelaide painter and sculptor John Stuart Dowie visited Kokoschka at Villeneuve in March 1977 and later noted: “He approves of Boyd and Nolan and sends Nolan his love. On the other hand, he dislikes Klimt and Schiele; and thinks that blatant sex has little place in art.”[29] Kokoschka’s “Expressionist” style may also be said to have influenced some other Australian artists such as Jon Molvig, but the influence in his case is more likely that of Ludwig Kirchner. Already in Australian public collections are at least two paintings by the Whitechapel Group member David Bomberg (1890–1957), whose landscape style is cognate with Kokoschka’s (for example, their views of Jerusalem). Bomberg’s magnificent oil The Garden and Tower of the Sacristy, Cuenca Cathedral (1934) is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection and his Bideford, Devon (c. 1946) is in the National Gallery of Victoria. It may be hoped that perhaps the National Gallery of Australia, or a state public gallery, might one day soon try to acquire a significant example or two of Oskar Kokoschka’s striking painted works. They are well worth considering, especially for our National Collection.

Dr Douglas Hassall is a regular contributor to Quadrant on art. Some works by Oskar Kokoschka are to be included in the exhibition “Vienna: Art & Design” at the NGV in Melbourne, scheduled from June 18 to October 9.