This essay on ‴Circe‵ and Expressionist Drama," which was left incomplete at the time of the author's death, engages with the rarely explored question of the relation between Joyce and Expressionism, ...using examples from Georg Büchner and Oskar Kokoschka. Opening with a survey of the existing criticism linking the two and a definition of Expressionism itself, it argues that Joyce used Expressionist dramatic techniques in the episode, including linguistic Expressionism, Messianism, and the use of light. The argument is developed in detail using Büchner's Woyzeck (1879) and Kokoschka's Hiob (1917). Woyzeck is tormented and cuckolded like Bloom and is especially persecuted by doctors. The cuckoldry theme in Hiob occurs with a certain treatment of fantasy that bears striking parallels to that of "Circe." The essay traces a number of direct connections to Expressionism dating from Joyce's residence in Zurich and his interest in Kokoschka's early painting of August Forel recorded by Dario di Tuoni in his memoir of Joyce in Trieste.
Result of our research is a monographic study dealing with a prominent part of Kokoschka's life and work which has hitherto been regarded too little by scholars. The years of his exile in Prague and ...particularly in London, where he had to work under a lot of stress and pressure, are the time in which his political allegories came to be. As these works are outside the established canon of art historical development, and as they have no affinity to Surrealism or to Abstract art, scholars have so far spent comparatively less effort to analyse them. This study approaches the group of these works from a transdisciplinary perspective. The authors (G. Sultano is trained historian, P. Werkner art historian) set out from different questions with regard to his oevre and his life. This results in combining the view of a prominent body of Kokoschka's paintings with a biographical perspective set against a political-historical background. The years between 1937 and 1950 were chosen as preliminary structure for a segment of a part of Kokoschka's life and work, in which he was hit to the utmost by the politcal changes of the time. 1937 was picked because of the prominent exhibition which Kokoschka had in that year at the Österreichische Museum für Kunst und Industrie in Vienna and also in the travelling exhibition "Degenerate Art", which was first opened in Munich. 1950 was picked for various reasons, among them the large overview of Kokoschka's work in the "Haus der Kunst" in Munich. By this, the artist was rehabilitated, as it was, at the place of his former degradation. Art historical analysis of Kokoschka's paintings is combined here with poltical history, with reception history and history of institutions, and also with questions regarding the role of the audience. The Viennese exhibition is analysed including studies of some of its proponents, among them the curator Carl Moll, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, the maecenas, and the museum's director, Richard Ernst. The show "Degenerate Art", which was held at nearly the same time in Munch, is looked upon with reference to the prototype of such "exhibitions of disgrace". The role attributed to Kokoschka in the show is also analysed. The auction in Lucerne, in 1939, in which highly prominent works from German museums were sold, shows itself as another variation of his defamation in the "Reich". Kokoschka had a prominent role in exile, first in Prague, then in London, where he became a leading figure among emigrants and in antifascist circles. The chapter on the poltical allegories both treats the allegorical group of his works and provides an elemental iconographical view in context. The era of the Cold War, which has also become prominent among art historians in recent years, plays an important role in the reception of Kokoschka's work after WW II. The artist's strenuous relationship to Viennese poltical and art circles is treated here, as well as the story of Kokoschka's portrait of the Viennese mayor Theodor Körner. Finally, the question of the artist's relationship to the Salzburg-based art dealer Friedrich Welz is examined, and also his conservative turnaround in the late 40's. The illustrations of the study are also of considerable interest, as they provide another form of insight at several occasions. Kokoschka, the letter-writer, is also being presented in a variety of long quotations. A synchronoptic presentation of political and cultural developments provides with a panorama of the time. A list of the artist's exhibitions, a selection of contemporary critiques in the press, and the literature list provide the scholar with material for further research.
Double-talented artists were particularly numerous during the period of expressionism, which was characterized by political and radical social changes. The book presented offers informations about ...the artists’ motivations and focuses on two excellent examples of artistic double-talent - Oskar Kokoschka, the founder of drama expressionism and Ludwig Meidner, highly praised for his apocalyptic landscapes. The interdisciplinary comparison of paintings and graphics with the dramas, poems and prose texts written by the artists allows offers valuable insights into their entire expressionistic oevre and, at the same time, a closer understanding of the relationship between art and literature.
Roos examines Oskar Kokoschka's life-size doll, which matched the exact proportions of his lover, Alma Mahler, who married another man. He points that the doll itself must be considered an artistic ...project that enhances the significance of Kokoschka's doll paintings and illuminates the understanding of Kokoschka as a modernist artist.
This essay examines the interpretive issues raised by Oskar Kokoschka’s sculpted bust The Warrior, in light of Kokoschka’s rejection of Gustav Klimt’s decorative use of ornament in favour of an ...Expressionist visual language of formal distortion and physiognomic exaggeration. Among the most salient properties introduced by Kokoschka’s mode of Expressionist portraiture is the depiction of human flesh as if it were transparent, with veins, arteries and nerve endings left visible on the surface of the skin. The essay also focuses on how Kokoschka’s experiments were patronized by the architect Adolf Loos, and how Loos and Kokoschka could have construed this new idiom as an evocation of psychological ‘truth’, an evocation consistent with the architect’s own obsession with truth to materials in architectural structures. The essay further argues that the association of Kokoschka’s suggestion of physical decay with psychological truth was essentially rhetorical; that this association could only have been made against time‐bound and culturally specific assumptions about the interchangeability of the physical and psychological; and that this association was culled from a broad panoply of ideas prominent in nineteenth‐century philosophy, medicine and psychiatry.
This essay examines Oskar Kokoschka's play Murderer, Hope of Women in the context of the antifeminine views of fin de siècle culture, paying particular attention to the ways art, science, philology, ...and the philosophy of history all contributed to reinforce the cultural and political disenfranchisement of women. In addition to investigating the intellectual assumptions underlying Murderer, the essay also argues that formal strategies had highly specific political meanings in Vienna 19149 and that Kokoschka, under the influence of his patrons, initiated a stylistic shift that aligned his own artistic production with the antifeminist ideology of his culture.
