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The knight-errant was the right figure for him. Kokoschka had to work in Germany because the decorative traditions of Vienna could not, in the end, contain the intensity he wanted to project into painting. And just as surely, he had to leave Germany because of Hitler. In 1937 he painted a big-jawed self portrait, titled Portrait of a "Degenerate Artist," which commemorated his inclusion in the Nazi exhibition of "Degenerate Art." A figure among the trees, in the background on the left, sketchily furnishes the key: it is the Adam from Masaccio's Expulsion from Paradise. Kokoschka was being driven from his European paradise. He went to England and remained throughout the war. There he painted a number of harsh, hard-to-read political allegories, inspired by the cartoons of Gillray and other Georgian caricaturists, and supported himself by teaching and portraiture.
In the postwar years, during which Kokoschka cast himself as a maestro appointed to pull the great European figurative tradition out of the grip of abstraction, his art declined in vitality. One soon wearies, for instance, of the view-fromthe-boardroom cityscapes of Berlin, London and New York that he turned out in some profusion for Axel Springer and other bigwigs of the postwar boom years. But to say that his talent collapsed like Chagall's is quite untrue. Chagall painted nothing but cloying ethnic kitsch for the last 30 years of his life. But in some of Kokoschka's last paintings there is the real sense of an old man's rage and an old man's freedom -- the sort of deliberate clumsiness by a highly gifted draftsman, the sense of the ludicrous posture, the gross energy of the old satyr, that fires up our responses when we look at a good late Picasso. Nowhere does this come out better than in Theseus and Antiope, the huge canvas he began in 1958 and worked on intermittently for 16 years, leaving it unfinished at the time of his death. If one can speak of neo-expressionism by an original expressionist, this painting is it. Everything about it, from the violently suffused colors to the lumpish drawing of the Amazon queen's feet, runs close to satire. Never, one suspects, has classical myth been rendered with such homely, indeed suburban, protagonists. But for the burning temples in the background one might suppose the scene was a Baltic beach in August. And yet it has a strange, mocking intensity: despite his official position, the old dog could still bite when left to his own subjects, far from the civic view and the official portrait, in his own studio.