Der Künstler als "Augenöffner" : Comenius als pädagogische und autobiografische Identifikationsfigur

As announced in the title, the newly tapped material has given rise to new insights into Kokoschka’s life and work. New perspectives are opened up by the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches, with research contributions from art and cultural history, from contemporary history, from literary studies and theater, and also from biographical research and gender studies. The gender discourses in Vienna after 1900 are known to have been shaped by friends and mentors of Kokoschka, such as Adolf Loos and Karl Kraus, and they undoubtedly had an impact on the young artist. However, as Katharina Prager explains in her essay in this volume, a differentiated, indeed ambivalent attitude on the gender issue gradually began forming among Kokoschka’s early companions. In any case, this issue remained virulent for Kokoschka until after World War I, as Bernadette Reinhold points out in her essay exploring the artist’s well-known doll fetish (1918/19). In recent decades, no other object has been given more attention in research, in contemporary art production, even in popular culture. No episode in his life has so many legends entwined around it—which the artist himself actively helped to promote. In her essay, Anna Stuhlpfarrer examines the legitimacy of Kokoschka’s reputation as a pioneer of Expressionist theater. This multimedia field of experimentation played a significant role in his life. Barbara Lesák explores the position Kokoschka carved out for himself in the history of Expressionist theater in Vienna and the unique contribution he made to the history of this medium. Kokoschka’s political engagement between 1934 and 1953 is the subject of three essays in this volume. In the first, Ines Rotermund Reynard concentrates on Kokoschka’s relationship with Paul Westheim, who fled from Germany to Paris in 1933, and on the role of Charlotte Weidler as a link between this eminent art critic and Kokoschka, a resident of Prague at the time. In the second, Lucy Wasensteiner explains Kokoschka’s involvement in Twentieth Century German Art, a 1938 exhibition in London originally planned as a protest against National Socialist art policies. In the third, Régine Bonnefoit documents how Kokoschka changed his image of Comenius according to his own stage of life and surrounding circumstances. The artist invoked this influential Moravian educator time and again to legitimize whatever cause or matter he was pursuing, be it pacifistic, political or humanitarian, art theoretical or autobiographical. In recent times, Kokoschka research has been stimulated by biographical research, which investigates autobiographical construction and the mechanisms for finding and determining one’s own identity as an artist. In this same vein, Birgit Kirchmayr examines Kokoschka’s “autobiographical life” in her essay entitled On the Legend of the Artist. Keith Holz analyzes the strategies the artist pursued from 1949 onward to market himself on the museum scene and in the art market in the United States. In her essay on the role of Japanese art in Kokoschka’s work, Aglaja Kempf delves into the aspect of intercultural exchange with non-European countries. Finally, Günter Berghaus turns to the South American continent in his study on the history of the reception of German Expressionism in Brazil, which is closely linked to the exile of Germanspeaking theater artists. The point of departure for his investigation is a production of Kokoschka’s drama Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, Hope of Women) that he himself directed in Rio de Janeiro in 1997.

The book is the result of an international conference that Régine Bonnefoit and Bernadette Reinhold organized at the University of Applied Arts Vienna on February 27th, 2020:
https://kunstsammlungundarchiv.at/oskar-kokoschka-zentrum/events/2020-02-27-int-tagung-oskar-kokoschka-neue-einblicke-und-perspektiven/