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Body and Soul: Oskar Kokoschka’s The Warrior , truth, and the interchangeability of the physical and psychological in fin‐de‐siècle Vienna
Author(s) -
Cernuschi Claude
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8365.00195
Subject(s) - evocation , depiction , oskar , art , art history , modality (human–computer interaction) , philosophy , literature , human–computer interaction , computer science
This essay examines the interpretive issues raised by Oskar Kokoschka’s sculpted bust The Warrior , in light of Kokoschka’s rejection of Gustav Klimt’s decorative use of ornament in favour of an Expressionist visual language of formal distortion and physiognomic exaggeration. Among the most salient properties introduced by Kokoschka’s mode of Expressionist portraiture is the depiction of human flesh as if it were transparent, with veins, arteries and nerve endings left visible on the surface of the skin. The essay also focuses on how Kokoschka’s experiments were patronized by the architect Adolf Loos, and how Loos and Kokoschka could have construed this new idiom as an evocation of psychological ‘truth’, an evocation consistent with the architect’s own obsession with truth to materials in architectural structures. The essay further argues that the association of Kokoschka’s suggestion of physical decay with psychological truth was essentially rhetorical; that this association could only have been made against time‐bound and culturally specific assumptions about the interchangeability of the physical and psychological; and that this association was culled from a broad panoply of ideas prominent in nineteenth‐century philosophy, medicine and psychiatry.