Art
Prospero and Caliban
By NEVILE W ALLIS
IT is an intensely moving testament of a humanist of rare vision and conviction, dispossessed and buffeted about twentieth-century Eur- ope, which is given us in the Arts Council's super- abundant exhibition of Koko- schka's works which fill seven rooms of the Tate Gallery. Expressionist painter, stage designer, dramatist, poet, and graphic artist of great nervous power, Kokoschka reminds us at the Tate of his unresting spiritual quest from those barely corporeal portraits of the Vienna years 1908-14 to the exuberance of such recent can- vases as his gull's-eye view of the Thames. At the same time, his stature as a painter was certainly not diminished in the Marlborough's much smaller selection two years ago; and it is clear here that the increasing virtuosity of his flicker- ing brushwork has come to project a kind of insouciant vitality which fails to record a tension of spirit that, more intermittently now, may still Underlie his grandest endeavour.
That this heart-tug may movingly qualify the most high-spirited rhapsodies to nature can be felt more consistently in the later Jack Yeats, Who like Kokoschka came to orchestrate his rain- bow notes with seeming improvisation. Seldom afterwards in his panoramic landscapes can the Austrian-born painter stir one as deeply as he does in 1934, just after the nationalistic putsch forced him from Vienna to Prague, there to capture the view across the Vltava to the Charles Bridge with a tremulous control of his calli- graphic brush which puts one in mind of light vibrancy, yet with a moodiness in the light transfiguring the medieval city which is peculiarly Kokoschka's, The moodiness of transient light thereafter becomes quicksilvery and expressive always of dramatic buoyancy, While the glory becomes actually gaudy in the sweep of the river viewed this May from the Vickers building, where a brio verging on slipslop altogether outruns the painter's questioning faculty.
The violent swaying of trees in the wind, the rapid vibration of their leaves, the rolling surface of the ocean in calm weather, and the titanic battle of the waves in storms are only some of the moods of the Dance of Nature.' Leopold _ Kokoschka's reflection on music aptly describes Kokoschka's later dithyrambic impulse, and it is natural that his art has communicated his exaltation most affectingly in such refuges from adversity as Polperro's cliffs in 1939. Crises and Tres the fleeting essence of a child's expression,
first radiance suffusing a new-found city,
to make emotional creation experiences have fired his ever since he left the Vienna Workshops _ "lake his penetrating and intensely disturbing contributions to Der Sturm in Berlin.
overwrought, early Viennese portraits, precious, ”verwrought, essentially linear, investigate the of rituality of his sitter in the twilight, as it were, a seance. A sourceless light will pick out
knobbly hands, or irradiate the hollow features of his friend Adolf Loos; while the apparition of two entwined children will personify the artist's nostalgic apprehension with the intensity of a sombre Lovis Corinth. A stylistic change followed from sulphurous murk to figure subjects constructed with a prismatic structure and iridescent planes. But his nervous execution remained in essence linear until his call-up for service in 1915, to become solid patchwork in post-war Dresden when his queer doll-like models acquired a cheerless variant of Fauvism. From then on Kokoschka's style became increasingly liberated and impressionistic alike in portrait and landscape, providing veduti as exhilarating as his Biarritz beach in the Twenties, and betraying a more relaxed spirit in recent years. The struggle indeed is over. This heroic, craggy figure, tardily honoured in England, does not want for com- missions.
The struggle is seen most poignantly in his graphic art—whether austere or agitated, the record always of a spiritual hypersensitivity. Only the inner anguish of a master draughtsman could have projected the image of man encased in the slough of the contorted Christ of Pieta. Only he could have explored the declivity of Karl Kraus's skull with a line like the rope of some climber tensely feeling his way down a cliff face.
If one likens Kokoschka to noble Prospero who to his state grew stranger, then Man Davie might fit the rumbustious part of the brave monster Caliban. Certainly Davie is our one and only island savage who spouts a mumbo-jumbo with the force of incantation. All the talk about Zen Buddhism or whatever is really neither here nor there, for his rude symbols are essentially as meaningless as his crazy titles and serve only as the instrument of a painter of demoniac energy and attack, whose colour and scrawling hand- writing are like no one else's except certain Jackson Pollocks of the 1940s. The exhibition of nearly ninety of Davie's paintings since 1957 which Gimpel's have mounted with liveliest pos- sible effect at the FBA Galleries in Suffolk Street tells me no more about him than his Whitechapel show, though it strengthens two convictions.
The first is that, in this purely intuitive kind, Davie is most satisfying when his painting is largest and densest, as in the congested imagery of Goddess of the Wheel, or the richly stumbled Red Parrot Joy. The uncut-jewellery of the colours and his instinctive decorative sense hold one most surely when the canvas has been fre- quently worked over and the whole texture coagulated. In his more fluid inventions, seem- ingly dashed off all premier coup, the snaky ideo- grams and cartwheels may appear no more than a spirited display of virtuosity, and the derisive snook-cocking becomes a bore when its shallow- ness is revealed. The artist's vitality, and his insistent bright scheme set off against black or luminous white, are not in themselves sufficient to sustain this huge exhibition without causing a revulsion of the critical intelligence which busies itself more profitably on the several sub- stantial compositions. Even so, one is convinced, in the second place, that Alan Davie has fulfilled himself. Whether you respond to his febrile mode of expressionism or not, it is demonstrably the only vehicle for his obsessional imagery.
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