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The significance of Oskar Kokoschka’s work lies beyond aesthetic analysis or art-historical categories. It cannot be defined in such terms. Repeated attempts have been made to label it, to render it universally accessible and fit it into a general scheme of things by applying to it such descriptive titles as ‘Expressionism’, ‘expressive Impressionism’, ‘modern revival of Danubian Baroque’ and so forth. None of these designations is adequate, though there is some justification for all of them. Kokoschka’s work is that of an individual who stands firmly within the mainstream of tradition, but who completely transforms what he takes over from this tradition, turning it into the instrument of an entirely personal and at times highly idiosyncratic record of his encounter with reality. Kokoschka’s significance does not lie in his having found or invented a style, a secure vantage-point from which a given aesthetic reality is always accessible. His path as a painter is not steady and assured; it is a series of new departures, a perpetual readiness to expose himself to visual reality. This continuous readiness to expose himself means that Kokoschka’s pictures are always painted under new conditions, in a new relationship to reality. They are not the outcome of a preconceived idea of the picture as such or of external reality, nor do they spring from the desire to pin down a transitory moment; each picture is a bridge between one moment and the next, an attempt to penetrate into the deeper reality below externals.

     This may explain the inventive fertility and diversity of Kokoschka’s work as a painter and also the difficulty at an adequate interpretation of it. It is difficult for the spectator to find his way about among these works, to do justice to each individual picture. Most of his admirers value their own particular version of Kokoschka, particular periods and particular pictures, remaining indifferent towards the rest. Kokoschka’s work makes great demands upon the spectator. Again and again he throws away the chance of seducing the spectator with ready-made forms; again and again he demands that the spectator lay himself open to the new and unfamiliar, offering him an aesthetic pleasure that is all the more acute because of its unfamiliarity.

     By repeatedly adopting a new attitude to the scene around him and surrendering himself entirely to the momentary situation, however, Kokoschka succeeds in getting more into his pictures than the outward situation. His portraits show the ‘inner face’ of his subjects, combining past, present and future in one portrayal; his landscapes open up a vista through the typical, as embodied in the visual reality of the moment, to something eternal that lies beyond it, by this very fact isolating the truly specific element in this momentary reality. Kokoschka wishes to see more than the play of light on the surface and to create more than a painted surface. But he also wishes to do more than merely depict himself, more than merely create an expression of himself in a certain situation; he is trying to confront and find himself in his work. As a first step towards grasping the meaning of his work, let us endeavour, not to place it in an art-historical category, but to see how art as he understands it is an ultimate aspect of our existence.

     Art is important and fruitful when it transcends what is available to our senses, when it shows images alien to our experience, when it opens our eyes and makes us ask questions. The ancient Chinese distinguished between two types of painters. The first practised painting as a craft for the purpose of embellishing objects of everyday use, decorating walls, adding to man’s enjoyment of life, and operating within the firmly established canon of aesthetic harmony. To the second, painting was given as an art, as a spiritual zone within which the painter could surrender himself in the fullest possible degree to the visible, in order to stand face to face with reality in the work of art, to destroy the outer crust, the façade, and to discern and portray the essence behind it, which is mysterious, flowing, eternal, alive and beyond the reach of conceptual thought. In Buddhist and Confucian China painters of this kind were called ‘monk-painters’, because they had to dedicate themselves and their lives entirely to this task of perceiving and making visible. Their works were looked upon as the ultimate religious act. Something similar may be meant when our Western tradition speaks of the ‘liberal arts’, even though this expression did not originally refer to the visual arts. The term may, however, have implied the spiritual area within which perception is possible in free contact with reality, the area within which man becomes freely responsible, free to answer the outside world with his reason, to occupy the position of counterpart to the outer world, which becomes the mirror of his own soul. The Humanists may have meant by ‘culture’ the ability of man’s reason to confront the multiple images of the external world freely, to rediscover the outside image within the human mind and finally transform the orbis into the orbis pictus so as to be able in turn to confront the external orbis in the orbis pictus. The ‘liberal arts’ were also strictly differentiated from everything in the nature of a craft subservient to ends limited by time and space. The more limited and categorized learning became, the more it either led to an abstract world-picture or served more everyday needs, the assurance of a livelihood or technical progress, the more the expression ‘liberal arts’ came to be restricted to the ‘pure’ arts — the disinterested activities in which Western man has again and again sought freedom and self-exposure to the world about him.

     Human history begins with the independence of the individual, with the question and the search for an answer; with the question which again and again implies a calling in question, the destruction of accepted ideas and world-pictures — in a word, revolution; the question that both cost Socrates his life and made it of such value. The inexhaustibly fertile West is not to be identified with any one of the forms to which it gave birth; it is neither Baroque nor Romanesque nor Gothic, neither Byzantium nor Rome; in the last analysis it is always the individual, the possibility of individualism, of ever-new departures. Just as the basis of the arts lies in the crafts, so the various historical periods, as opposed to the Western world as a whole, may be looked upon as a necessary precondition for the encounter with reality, as the soil which had to be there before any building could take place at all and which provided the foundation for all questioning and all confrontation with the visual world. Within the various historical periods men were led by tradition to achieve form and to find their own way of dealing with their visual environment. In our own day, however, the West seemed as though it had devoured itself, become infertile, devoid of culture, no longer productive of any personal form, taken off its guard by machine-made interpretations of the world. Then questioning — looking, seeking and answering — reappeared with pristine vigour in art, the domain of human life most closely bound up with the senses. Questions were put with absolute directness, yet astonishingly enough the wealth of tradition, which had seemed to be buried under the rubble of the ages, clearly re-emerged in the work of artists.

     Oskar Kokoschka is a figure of our epoch, an epoch apparently doomed to decay, and yet he bears witness in his work to the fertility, the living continuity of the Western world. Rilke wrote of him in a letter: ‘It seems as if his great gifts are inseparably bound up with inherent dangers that are perhaps nothing but the universal perils of the age, except that in this artist they are reborn, grow with his artistic output and expand their destructive power in step with the enlargement of his personality.’ This same ‘destructive power’, however, becomes fruitful and productive when harnessed to the work of art. The history of art is a process of breaking down finite form and striving to give concrete shape to infinite reality. It is a story of great individuals; it begins with the Greeks, now almost beyond our understanding, who conceived the human figure in motion, and goes on to the masters of the Byzantine frescoes, to the early French miniaturists, to the creator of the statues at Chartres, to Leonardo, who recognized the movements of light and shade as factors of our vision, to Breughel and Rembrandt, Corot and Delacroix. Kokoschka and his work take their place in this list of masters whose achievements transcended the limitations of their age and so remain forever vital and timeless. Disregarding the perils involved, he pushes on to the limits of the visually possible, and so overcomes in his work, both as a painter and as a painter committed to the present day, the dangers that threaten him and all of us in this age. Thomas Mann writes in a letter that Kokoschka seems to him the ‘epitome of modern painting’. He continues: ‘Shall I reduce what I mean to a brief, almost humorous formula? What seems to me to be embodied in Kokoschka’s pictures is something like civilized magic. Here is a modern creative spirit who remains true to the phase of evolution in which life has set him down, who shows no trace of the snobbery that is continually looking backwards, no trace of undignified yearning for the primitive, and yet learns to see by the simple process of looking; an initiate, in spite of and along with all his high culture, which he makes no attempt to deny, and in spite of his fin de siècle refinement of taste; an efficient dreamer, a master of precise fantasy, in whose magical work nature and reality become transparent and allow the spirit to shine through.’