The unchanging eye.
The Contemporary Workshop| N° d'inventaire | 23794 |
| Format | 16 x 20 |
| Détails | 448 p., paperback. |
| Publication | Strasbourg, 2021 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782850350283 |
In France, Kokoschka's works are mainly remembered for his Viennese paintings from the 1910s, those that link him to the Secession, to Klimt and to Schiele in the "joyous apocalypse" of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is to risk ignoring the fact that this soon-to-be-exiled painter felt throughout his life much closer to Greek and Baroque art, which he believed to be borderless, than to all the occasional movements and deadly labels of criticism; and that, far from being content to capture an end-of-the-world atmosphere in portraits of consumptive aristocrats, he was a tireless conscientious objector, determined to open the eyes of his contemporaries to the specifically cultural dimension of past and future catastrophes.
This collection of articles, lectures, and essays remedies this danger by giving Kokoschka himself a voice. This collection of texts, chosen in 1975 by the author as the most representative of his thought and his commitment to art, is inaugurated by the few brief but dense aesthetic essays of his youth, in which he expresses the conviction that he will ultimately only unfold and reaffirm later: that of the primacy in art of the individual "consciousness" of the artist, responsible for keeping his eyes open, transmitting his singular vision to others, and thus shaping and humanizing the world.
This formula, in which he detects the very essence of art and the concept of humanity as European culture inherited it from the Greeks, he then identifies the ideal illustration in the artists he admires – Altdorfer, Rembrandt, Maulbertsch, Van Gogh, Munch… – and the complete failure in those he attacks with constant ferocity: abstract artists from Kandinsky onwards, responsible according to him for the banishment of the human figure and the world outside of art, and therefore complicit in an impoverishment of our experience which would have contributed to the atrocities of the 20th century.
Kokoschka's positions go far beyond aesthetic discussion. Expanding to the dimensions of cultural criticism, they return to key moments in the history of Europe – the scene, according to him, since the Persian Wars, of a permanent confrontation between the human and barbaric inclinations of man – to detect underlying trends and better act on the present. The painter distinguished himself through his work in the field of pedagogy, documented in the third part by the texts from his experience at the "School of the Gaze" in Salzburg from 1953 to 1964, in which he offered to teach several hundred young people how to "see with their own eyes."
The fourth part, finally, retraces some decisive stages of his own career and reaffirms the principles that guided his work as a portraitist, allegorist, draftsman and even scenographer. This means that this volume, revealing the writer, unknown in France, who doubles as the painter Kokoschka, enriches the experience of an innovative painting that knew how to update tradition to think about the present, while deserving to be ranked among the remarkable works of 20th-century Kulturkritik.
In France, Kokoschka's works are mainly remembered for his Viennese paintings from the 1910s, those that link him to the Secession, to Klimt and to Schiele in the "joyous apocalypse" of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is to risk ignoring the fact that this soon-to-be-exiled painter felt throughout his life much closer to Greek and Baroque art, which he believed to be borderless, than to all the occasional movements and deadly labels of criticism; and that, far from being content to capture an end-of-the-world atmosphere in portraits of consumptive aristocrats, he was a tireless conscientious objector, determined to open the eyes of his contemporaries to the specifically cultural dimension of past and future catastrophes.
This collection of articles, lectures, and essays remedies this danger by giving Kokoschka himself a voice. This collection of texts, chosen in 1975 by the author as the most representative of his thought and his commitment to art, is inaugurated by the few brief but dense aesthetic essays of his youth, in which he expresses the conviction that he will ultimately only unfold and reaffirm later: that of the primacy in art of the individual "consciousness" of the artist, responsible for keeping his eyes open, transmitting his singular vision to others, and thus shaping and humanizing the world.
This formula, in which he detects the very essence of art and the concept of humanity as European culture inherited it from the Greeks, he then identifies the ideal illustration in the artists he admires – Altdorfer, Rembrandt, Maulbertsch, Van Gogh, Munch… – and the complete failure in those he attacks with constant ferocity: abstract artists from Kandinsky onwards, responsible according to him for the banishment of the human figure and the world outside of art, and therefore complicit in an impoverishment of our experience which would have contributed to the atrocities of the 20th century.
Kokoschka's positions go far beyond aesthetic discussion. Expanding to the dimensions of cultural criticism, they return to key moments in the history of Europe – the scene, according to him, since the Persian Wars, of a permanent confrontation between the human and barbaric inclinations of man – to detect underlying trends and better act on the present. The painter distinguished himself through his work in the field of pedagogy, documented in the third part by the texts from his experience at the "School of the Gaze" in Salzburg from 1953 to 1964, in which he offered to teach several hundred young people how to "see with their own eyes."
The fourth part, finally, retraces some decisive stages of his own career and reaffirms the principles that guided his work as a portraitist, allegorist, draftsman and even scenographer. This means that this volume, revealing the writer, unknown in France, who doubles as the painter Kokoschka, enriches the experience of an innovative painting that knew how to update tradition to think about the present, while deserving to be ranked among the remarkable works of 20th-century Kulturkritik.