Letter from Oskar Kokoschka to J.P. Hodin

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[Translation/transcription]

Best Prague grape juice at the Washington Gallery

45a King Henry's Road


Dear Dr Hodin,

Please forgive my delay in responding to your kind letter, which was all the more welcome since we have nothing to laugh about now. Without a bank account a refugee in good old England is worth no more than a dog or a cat, even if he's Rembrandt or Michelangelo.

I like your idea very much indeed. My desire to reform the school system (which is now supposed to mean all state education, including the colleges) always gets put back to some indefinite point in the future, 'when the time is ripe'. In the Dollfuss era the schools ministry in Vienna sent me their overt rejection on the back of a postcard. The purse strings are tight when it comes to education - unless one happens to be talking about cadet schools! They told Comenius much the same thing during the Thirty Years War. But we're only twenty-five years into the present one, so there's hope yet.

And so here I'm sending you one of the many versions of my appeal and my recently finished play about Comenius. A translation and performance in your country would be the jackpot. Such things are still affordable there for the time being. The publishers here, like the theatre-going public (only the gentry, no-one gives a thought to the little people), just want light entertainment, preferably detective stories.

Unfortunately I can only offer indirect help with photos of my work, since I was unable to bring anything over with me and the first search of my home took place the very day after the occupation of Vienna. I'm at the top of the Nazis' list because I published an article in support of Max Liebermann in the Frankfurter Zeitung in which I berated the German artists for having fallen so far in [illegible] from the man who guided and nurtured them for forty years. That was the last day before censorship came in. Westheim may still have the article, along with various other material. I'm giving you his address here. Dr Feilchenfeldt in Amsterdam, Keizersgracht 109, and Dr Nirenstein-Kallir, care of Galerie St Etiènne in Paris (which currently has an exhibition of my pictures from various émigré collections), have plentiful material. The two of them are exhibiting what they were able to cobble together with Dr [illegible] at Galerie Mathiessen, Stockholm. This ought to help with your plans. You may even be able to get some material from Galerie Fischer in Lucerne, which is currently auctioning my pictures to obtain foreign currency for the Third Reich. Apparently a large number of paintings and drawings have been sold directly to the Americans via the Nazi art and stock market department. The truth is they will make good money from the whole degenerate art swindle, while yours truly (far more often than before) doesn't know what he's supposed to live on. Why are the Swedes and Danes not now buying my pictures in Lucerne? If they did they might prevent them from destruction and neglect at a time when all that matters in Berlin is foreign currency. People have money there, don't they? Here we're disconsolate because the government is doing everything it can to prop up the current system. The well-to-do are intent on speculation and war profiteering. Naturally they don't have the time or inclination to trouble themselves with cultural questions.

I currently have a new, particularly good self-portrait on display at the Tate Gallery here (ask Director John Rothenstein for a photo). It's just a loan, though; the well-heeled directors here have known me for twenty years, but if you're a living painter from Germany with no standing in the international art market, they don't have any funds for you. This seems incredible to me because I was the only modern painter who refused to do serial paintings. This was why I voluntarily walked away from the fanstastic contract with Cassirer in the middle of the crisis ten years ago. I sent an open letter to the Frankfurter Zeitung about this too. You could ask the editors for it if you liked. Perhaps Westheim still has a copy?

Crès in Paris published another little book by Heilmaier about ten years ago. With luck you might find it in a French bookshop. The text contains several factual errors because certain people in Vienna stood to benefit by playing me off against their own protégés. (Nirenstein always did whatever harm he could in this respect, since [illegible].) Westheim remains the most reliable author. You must consult him. There's a long article under my name in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, where you'll also find me under Expressionism, Germany, Literature, Painting and so on. In America there's a lot by Benson, though you won't be able to get hold of it at the moment. If anything occurs to me that might be of use to you I'll take the liberty of letting you know. But for now I'll give your eyes a break; my handwriting is becoming illegible because I'm tired, despondent and unwell. It's some consolation that this was always the lot of German painters. Dürer had to sell his work at the fair with his wife hitched to the handcart, and the elderly Waldmüller, expelled from the academy as 'degenerate', had to let rooms for a living as his reward for introducing plein-air painting.

Do let me hear from you soon, dear doctor.

Gratefully yours,

OK

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