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In point of fact, the image of Kokoschka as a prophet martyred by the middle-class audience of Vienna and Berlin was far from the truth, despite the zeal with which he curated it. Kokoschka could rarely miss an opportunity to present himself in heroic silhouette on the barricades of culture. Thus, as Peter Vergo and Yvonne Modlin show in their catalog essay on O.K.'s work as a playwright, his own story of the first performance of his expressionist drama Murderer Hope of Women in Vienna in 1909 was fiction. In his 1971 memoirs he described a screaming audience, "foot-stamping, brawling and chair- brandishing," an impending fire, a riot of Balkan soldiers, his own near arrest and a chorus of savage reviews. Actually, the Viennese newspapers of the day reported amused theatergoers taking the play "as a piece of fun, with sympathetic good humor."
It is unlikely, however, that his Austrian sitters took their portraits the same way. There is still something disquieting about their effigies, pinned on the dark canvas in those peculiar scratchy tones, the flesh iridescent and yet as musty as a dead moth's wing, the fingers crooked like sickly vine prunings. Apart from a few ferrety, etiolated aristocrats with names like Joseph de Montesquiou-Fezensac, most of the people who were prepared to undergo the ratchetting of what Kokoschka called his "psychological tin opener" were fellow artists and intellectuals. These "black portraits" have perhaps been overpraised. They are irresolute in form and full of deices from Ensor, Schiele, Redon and Van Gogh. At their occasional best, as in O.K.'s portrait of Loos, Van Gogh's influence predominates, and the sticky coils of paint develop a high psychic pressure: Loos, riddled with syphilis, all twisting hands and hunted glare, seems ready to implode. But Kokoschka's ability to draw with paint, to sustain a rhythm of marks across the whole surface instead of niggling at patches, came out on the eve of the war in portraits like the brilliantly energetic Franz Hauer, 1914.
This intensity entered his work when Alma Mahler entered his life. In Two Nudes (The Lovers), 1913, O.K. and Alma embrace naked, full length, like arrested waltzers. In the enigmatic Knight Errant, 1914-15, with its creamy paint and cold prismatic colors, the artist is seen lying down exhausted in knight's armor, a pilgrim's scallop shell at his side, abandoned in a wilderness vaguely reminiscent of Altdorfer's high alpine views, while an angel extends a martyr's palm, and Alma lurks sirennaked in the middle distance. Here all the emotional threads are rolled together: Kokoschka's fear of the war, his sense of displacement and exile, his self-pity and his amorous miseries.