The initials "OK," like a brusque mark of approval, are scrawled in the corners of a few of the best paintings of our century. They belonged to Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), the visionary Austrian painter whose career spanned seven decades and not a few places of exile. Born in the world of the Emperor Franz Josef, he died in that of Reagan and Thatcher, just before the expressionist revival of the '80s took hold. Recent years have seen major shows of such expressionist masters as Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann, and now the 100th anniversary of O.K.'s birth is marked by a retrospective at London's Tate Gallery. (The exhibition runs through Aug. 10, and will go to Zurich in the fall and New York City in the winter.) Comprising 241 paintings and drawings, with prints and assorted memorabilia, this will be remembered as the definitive Kokoschka show. The man it reveals, in his waxing and waning powers, his conflicts, insights and gifts of draftsmanship, appears as one of the most absorbing creatures of old modernism.
Some artists have a flair for creating maestrohood from a succession of scandals; Kokoschka was one. Almost from the moment he left art school he assumed center stage in the Viennese avant-garde, enacting its fixations on love and death, abandonment and deviancy. Painting apart, he worked hard to earn his nickname "der Tolle" (the crazy man). George Grosz remembered him at a ball in Berlin, gnawing on the fresh and bloody bone of an ox. He sometimes hid among the waxworks of criminals in the chamber of horrors of the Berlin Panoptikum, and sprang out with a howl to frighten the visitors. These early "happenings" (artist as cannibal, artist as criminal) were subtexts to the main theme of artist as primitive, untrammeled by conventions of any kind. O.K.'s letters were full of nostalgia for the innocence and vitality he felt had been lost to Europe under the crust of bourgeois sublimation. As an expressionist, he was one of the last children of Rousseau, and he idealized the noble savage within himself. That this savage was the cultural artifact of the middle classes whose values he longed to escape was no mean irony. Kokoschka's shenanigans failed to throw the burghers into the turmoil he hoped for, but they made an indelible impression on his friends, a circle that included the satirist Karl Kraus, the architect Adolf Loos and a galaxy of painters from Gustav Klimt to Wassily Kandinsky. His most eccentric episode was that of the doll. In the spring of 1912 he fell violently in love with Alma Mahler, widow of the composer and a pretentious man-eater. Their affair lasted three years, and she dumped him in favor of the architect Walter Gropius soon after Kokoschka enlisted in the imperial dragoons to fight in the first World War. This, combined with the horrors of the trenches and the shock of being shot and bayoneted nearly to death, drove O.K. over the brink. He had a Munich dollmaker construct a soft, life-size, redhaired effigy of his former lover, fetishistically complete in every anatomical detail. The doll shared his bed and during the day he would dress it up and take it out. In Self- Portrait with Doll, 1920-21, Kokoschka is seen pointing with a woebegone expression at its sexual parts, presumably to indicate a cooling of the one- sided affair. Eventually, after he and some friends got drunk, he "murdered" the doll and flung it on a garbage truck in Dresden: the dumper dumped.