A Degenerate!
Little red fish,
little fish red
with a triple-edged knife I’ll cut you dead,
then with my fingers I’ll tear you in two,
put an end to the silent circling you do.
As a fish owner, this poem gives me a bit of the creeps, I’ll admit. But it also troubles me that it might not have anything to do with fish at all.
Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian painter, poet, writer, and teacher best known for his powerful expressionistic portraitures and sceneries, as well as his ideas on the vision that impacted the Viennese Expressionist movement. A movement that hosted more brilliant painters of the calibre of Egon Schiele.
Kokoschka, who will see himself as a martyr of the arts, picked up a paintbrush to participate in passionate debates concerning the mysteries of human psychology, life and the unconscious. Given the atmosphere of the period and the rising conservatism that saw the abolition of contemporary art, the painter referred to himself as a “degenerate” in a self-portrait. A word, an insult, that Hitler and the Nazis would have frequently used to characterise most modern art.
To be a Degenerate
All that’s left now is purely poetic work, putting more life into individual places, as I’ve made so sure of the fundamental mood and dimension of expression that it won’t leave me groping around in uncertainty any more.
— Oskar Kokoschka
Socially, Kokoschka was both vilified and embraced as a saviour of the arts. When his first paintings gained notoriety, he was soon expelled from the famous Academy of Arts and Craft in Vienna. Nonetheless, Adolf Loos, the prominent architect and social reformer, welcomed him as a cherished student, placing the painter under his influential wings.
In 1910, Loos arranged his first solo exhibition in Berlin. In this period, Kokoschka shaved his head during the time and painted self-portraits with the look of an enlightened prisoner, condemned for his original ideas.
Oskar Kokoschka boldly transitioned from a more ornamental to a robust Expressionism that was a way to express the deepest needs and thoughts of humanity. Kokoschka, like many Expressionists, rejected harmonising colour and form effects in favour of creating tumultuous compositions with clashing hues and distorted angles to produce a raw emotion aimed to awaken the audience from bourgeois monotony and conservatism. As we will briefly see later, all of these characteristics were disliked by a little man named Adolf Hitler.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Art Avo to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.