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"A Sea Ringed with Visions" – Oskar Kokoschka’s Reception of Sigmund Freud’s Theories in His London Years
Maison d'édition
London: Palgrave MacMillan
Date de parution
2020
In
Freud and the Émigré. Austrian Émigrés, Exiles and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1930s–1970s
De la page
115
A la page
139
Résumé
This chapter examines Oskar Kokoschka's reception of Freud’s theories from 1938 onwards. In London, the artist is part of networks of emigrants and British intellectuals in which circles psychoanalysis is discussed with zeal. These include Herbert Read, Antoine Graf Seilern, and the Prague-born art historian Joseph P. Hodin. From the 1950s onward, Hodin commissioned six specialists for Expression-research and psychologists to “psychoanalyze” the artist. In 1971, he published Oskar Kokoschka. A Psychography based on their findings, and in it tried out a new form of biography, which was made possible in Britain only through the widespread knowledge of Freud's teachings. Kokoschka tried to present himself as an artist familiar with psychoanalysis by insisting that his early essay On the Nature of Visions (1912) be included in his first English-language monograph by émigré Edith Hoffmann (1947). In his essay, he compares consciousness with the surface of a lake from which visions emerge from hidden layers of the soul and create rings. The example of Kokoschka's triptych The Prometheus Saga shows how the artist, in the milieu of Count Seilern, introduced symbols into his painting in 1950, which suggest his knowledge of castration theories as developed by Freud and Anton Ehrenzweig in their interpretations of ancient myths.
Identifiants
Autre version
https://www.springer.com/de/book/9783030517861
Type de publication
book part
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