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Kokoschka gets early portrait exhibition

By FREDERICK M. WINSHIP
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NEW YORK, June 7 (UPI) -- Austrian-born painter-playwright Oskar Kokoschka, a towering cultural figure in Europe for more than 60 years, was one of the last great portraitists to work in an era when photography had made portrait painting passé.

Kokoschka, who died in 1980 at 93, is being given a spring exhibition of 40-odd early portraits painted in Austria and Germany from 1910 to 1914 at the Neue Galerie Museum of German and Austrian Art, the first major loan exhibition undertaken by Manhattan's newest museum. The show will travel to Hamburg, Germany, in July.

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Kokoschka's art and works for the theater got him into a lot of trouble.

His politically and socially critical dramas caused such a public outcry in Austria that he was fired from his teaching post at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts. He sought refuge in Switzerland in 1909 and eventually took up a teaching post in Germany at the Dresden Academy.

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Hitler's art censors declared his expressionistic paintings "degenerate" in 1937, and he was forced to flee again, this time to England. He became a British subject in 1947 and kept right on painting into the 1970s. He is best remembered in the United States for his panoramic urban views of such cities as Vienna, London and Madrid. One of his most celebrated works was "Manhattan with the Empire State Building," painted on a visit here in 1966.

But many critics, particularly in Europe, consider his portraits superior to his cityscapes.

Kokoschka was bigger than life and somewhat eccentric, much to the delight of his legion of admirers. When his affair with Alma Mahler, widow of composer Gustav Mahler, ended in 1917, he had a life-size doll made in her image that he took around with him to cafes. He shocked his New York dealer by demanding (and getting) a bottle of whiskey well before lunch.

But how this bon vivant could handle oils, and watercolors! And he was no slouch when it came to rapid charcoal and pencil sketches, some of which are in the Neue Galerie show along with work he did for the Vienna Crafts Studio illustrating his swift passage into Expressionism before he left Vienna. There is also a section of the show devoted to architect Adolf Loos, who was young Kokoschka's mentor in his artistic development.

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Kokoschka had seen some portraits by Vincent Van Gogh in 1906 and was impressed by the Dutch artist's ability to achieve a psychological profile of his sitters. His earlier style of painting in delicate, agitated lines and naturalistic colors soon gave way to a darker palette and heavier, often broken outlines. He concentrated on the face and hands of his sitters, and he depicted them with an inner glow and often surrounded them with a fluorescent aura.

He eventually discarded outlines altogether and modeled his subjects in color. He claimed to be painting his sitters' souls and apparently had little concern as to whether he got a good likeness, just as long as the portraits were vibrant and shouted with life, reflecting the artist's ability to record his reactions to his sitters directly on canvas without making preliminary sketches.

"I tried to intuit from the face, from its play of expressions and from gestures, the truth about a particular person, and to recreate in my own pictorial language the distillation of a human being that would survive in my memory," he once wrote.

His most celebrated portrait -- actually a double portrait of art historian Hans Tietze and his wife, Erica, in 1909 -- is in the show. It shows the Tietzes reaching out to each other with expressive, almost gnarled hands, although their glances do not meet, so that the painting is more of a paean to psychic need than to love.

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There is also a self portrait painted in 1913 with fearful eyes and twisted mouth and a portrait of himself with Alma Mahler painted in the same year showing them dancing nude in a pastoral landscape. A portrait of Alma by herself is not particularly flattering, although Kokoschka attempts to endow her with a Mona Lisa look.

Less enigmatic but almost as candid are his brilliant portraits of Loos, composer Anton Webern, portrayed with a hangdog expression, and Herwarth Walden, one of the artist's Berlin patrons. Almost cruel are portraits of Moritz Hirsch, father of an actor friend, whose grotesque grin reveals a set of false teeth, and of writer Ludwig Ritter von Janikowski whose face is a greenish-yellow mask.

A quote from his friend, Tietze, would seem to be the last word on these early portraits, which though not large are monumental in their intensity: "Like a young giant, he (Kokoschka) let himself go with complete abandon and achieved effects that in some respects surpass those he was to obtain in later years by more considered means."

It is no wonder that Kokoschka's insights marked him as one of the great humanists of his time and won him the Erasmus Prize, one of Europe's highest honors, in 1960.

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