ABSTRACT
The Austrian painter and draftsman Oskar Kokoschka was once the very archetype of the artist-rebel. To a public that loved every form of decorative dissimulation Kokoschka offered a vision that insisted on honesty and pain, on the raw nerves of life as it was actually lived, rather than on its comfortable transmutation into one or another version of exquisite fantasy. In the large exhibition of Kokoschka's work at the Marl-borough-Gerson Gallery, there is a good selection of the pictures that earned this artist his reputation as a firebrand in the decade before the First World War. Gustav Klimt is regarded as a classic of Art Nouveau, and Kokoschka—at the least the Kokosehka of these early portraits—a classic of Expressionism. What is odder is that Kokoschka should himself have become, in the long run, a far more traditional painter than the eminently respectable Klimt.
