Impassioned Love and Tormented Loss: A New Acquisition by Oskar Kokoschka
Tags for: Impassioned Love and Tormented Loss: A New Acquisition by Oskar Kokoschka
Blog Post
Collection
Exhibitions
Emily J. Peters, Curator of Prints and Drawings
May 4, 2018
In September 2017, the Cleveland Museum of Art acquired the opaque watercolor painting on paper Birth of a Child by Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka (Austrian, 1886–1980).
Kept in a European private collection for more than 80 years, the work has not been shown in a public exhibition since 1994 and has never been on view in the United States. By bringing this work to Cleveland, we gain a masterpiece by an artist whose painted oeuvre is not represented in the collection. Along with other Expressionist works, Birth of a Child is on view now through May 13 in the James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Gallery as part of the exhibition Graphic Discontent: German Expressionism on Paper.
Working in Vienna, Oskar Kokoschka was a key practitioner of Expressionism, a movement in the visual, performing, and literary arts that began around 1905 and continued through World War I (1914–18). Like other Expressionists — in Berlin, Munich, and elsewhere in Central Europe — Kokoschka rejected classical and realist art traditions in favor of a new visual language that encompassed fundamental emotions such as joy, sorrow, anger, and fear. After dropping out of the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts in 1909, he developed a highly personal style, articulated through dissonant colors and gestural forms. This is evident in a number of important painted portraits, as well as numerous studio drawings, print series, and commissions, that he created before the outbreak of war in 1914.
“Like other Expressionists — in Berlin, Munich, and elsewhere in Central Europe — Kokoschka rejected classical and realist art traditions in favor of a new visual language that encompassed fundamental emotions such as joy, sorrow, anger, and fear.” — Emily J. Peters, Curator of Prints and Drawings
Birth of a Child embodies Kokoschka’s impassioned — verging on tormented — exploration of the human condition. In the center of the composition, the woman in white is the birthing mother. The hardship of the birthing process is relayed in the gestures and touch of the three women at her bedside: one in pink holds the birthing woman’s arms above her head, while another in green grasps her shoulders; a third pours a basin of water between her legs. The baby is noticeably absent, and the mother’s lifeless pallor foretells a tragic outcome. The large size of the sheet (19 1/2 x 22 in.) and the bold colors applied in broad, sweeping passages, as well as the strong diagonal of the composition and sharp angles, make an immediate emotional impact on the viewer. Up close, Kokoschka’s drawn lines in chalk are visible, which reinforce the directionality of the gestures and outline the faces while also drawing attention to the artist’s hand.
Kokoschka made Birth of a Child in preparation for a large fresco for a reception hall at the Gräbschener Cemetery in Breslau (present-day Poland). He won the commission in 1914 and planned the designs in November and December of that year. The overall scheme, which is relayed in a compositional study now in Switzerland, was to portray the inescapable presence of death at every stage of life: birth, youth, middle age, and old age. The birth stage was to appear in the lower left of the fresco. It would have included Birth of a Child, the figure of Death — cloaked in white at the foot of the bed and grasping a newborn — and angels above, which could be confused with demons in this highly pessimistic rendering of the fate and futility of human existence.
To prepare for this large commission, Kokoschka visited the frescos made around 1305 by Italian artist Giotto at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy. The diagonal composition and bold, flat colors, as well as the mournful expressions of Kokoschka’s figures, evoke Giotto’s Lamentation, while Kokoschka’s woman in pink, with her halo-like head covering, recalls John the Evangelist or Mary Magdalene weeping over Christ’s dead body. The Expressionists were fascinated by the art that they called “primitive”: it was undoubtedly Giotto’s forms as well as his content that appealed to Kokoschka’s desire to place human experience into a spiritual context.
A number of personal factors informed Kokoschka’s depiction of the doomed scene in Birth of a Child. Influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud, Otto Weininger, and Arthur Schopenhauer, Kokoschka, in the years leading up to 1914, repeatedly explored in his work the primal, physical, and psychical struggles between male and female. In 1909 he wrote and produced the allegorical play Murder, Hope of Women,in which he cast the male-female struggle for supremacy as a sexual battle that ended in violence and death. The play caused some critics to call him a madman; Kokoschka’s poster design — depicting a grotesque Pietà — for the theater where he staged the play is an icon of Expressionism.
“A number of personal factors informed Kokoschka’s depiction of the doomed scene in Birth of a Child. Influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud, Otto Weininger, and Arthur Schopenhauer, Kokoschka, in the years leading up to 1914, repeatedly explored in his work the primal, physical, and psychical struggles between male and female.” — Emily J. Peters, Curator of Prints and Drawings
Beginning in 1912, Kokoschka’s passionate affair with Alma Mahler, the widow of Austrian composer Gustav Mahler, seems to have further affected his state of mind. Kokoschka portrayed their intimacy and passion in a number of paintings, drawings, and prints. In 1914, however, Mahler terminated the relationship for fear of “being consumed by passion.” Kokoschka’s published letters reveal that his pain over the break-up was intensified by Mahler’s decision to have an abortion in 1913. Several of his drawings from the period explore the tortured nature of sexual love and the loss of a child: Alma Mahler with Child and Death, 1913, in a private collection, portrays Mahler in the role of mother and torturer. Kokoschka’s Pietà — It Is Enough, 1914, depicts Mahler as virgin mother and Kokoschka as martyr. These drawings relate to Birth of a Child in theme and composition, suggesting that Kokoschka’s design for the cemetery’s reception hall — what was essentially a macabre dance of death — held universal as well as deeply personal meaning for him.
Soon after making Birth of a Child, in early 1915, Kokoschka joined the army and left Vienna for the Russian front; badly injured there, he was eventually discharged. Because war was coursing across the continent, his commission for the reception hall at Breslau unfortunately never came to fruition. Kokoschka’s obsession with Alma Mahler continued to torture him: just after the war, he bizarrely commissioned a life-size doll made in her image, even posing the doll for several ghoulish portraits. Kokoschka wrote that the exercise of drawing and painting the doll finally “cured him of his passion,” and he dramatically destroyed it during a party in 1922.
By that time, he was teaching at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. Declared a “degenerate” artist by Hitler in 1934, Kokoschka fled abroad, eventually settling in England. In doing so, he abandoned both his country and Alma Mahler, who, with her third husband, writer Franz Werfel, left Europe for the United States.