Copy of letter from Oskar Kokoschka to J.P. Hodin

Description

[Translation/transcription]

120 Eyre Court
Finchley Road
NW8
Primrose 1962

Dear Hodinus,

I hope you and your family have survived the holidays and that you're up and about again by now. I've been fighting off a flu for a couple of weeks, so I really ought to get back to bed, but I can't bring myself to do that because I have so many letters to write. I can't write in bed. I hope you won't use your collection of my letters for anything other than dating my works and figuring out where I've been. In this connection the bon mots and anecdotes published about me in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung by Frau Dr Genia Schwarzwald might be of more interest to you. This brilliant woman was a close friend to me and Adolf Loos, Karl Kraus and Peter Altenberg in the critical years before and after the First World War. She was always sympathetic and tactful in her repeated attempts to put our messy affairs in order.

I can promise Mr Gabrielsson a self-portrait before the year is out. The only question is how I get it to him and how I will get to see his old, very beautiful oriental carpet and, perhaps on seeing it, find inspiration for the portrait. I would of course be delighted if a good picture of me were to figure in the largest collection of self-portraits in the North.

What you write about Mr Rössler from Vienna sheds some light on the origin of all the suspect material that's being disseminated under my name from Prague and Vienna. I've seen almanachs in Vienna that have printed my name beneath poems I never wrote. Not a single officer has been able to help me, though I can hardly have given anyone a collection of poems from the period before 1918, because I hadn't written any. You must know how irritating it is for me that the very people in Vienna who misunderstood me and forced me to leave now seek to profit from the situation by promoting the work of Egon Schiele, one of my imitators, presenting him as my friend and classmate, though I never wished to meet him and actually always managed to avoid doing so. They have him sharing a studio with me and even lying in my bed. As for Herren Rössler, Nierenstein etc., they all leech off his legacy. For all I know, the diary published under Schiele's name during the First World War may have been written by Rössler or the art dealer Nierenstein. In any case, the author had the bare-faced audacity to deny that I was ever injured in action. According to a little book published in 1945 by the Ammandus Verlag in Vienna (I've been trying to prove this for ages), this Viennese product Schiele made a first attempt to copy my drawings in 1910 - drawings I had already exhibited as my Träumende Knaben [Dreaming Boys] at the Art Show of 1908. You'll also find a few pencil studies of the colour lithographs from the Träumende Knaben in the Faber & Faber volume. These drawings were bought cheaply at the time by my friends in Vienna, so I was deeply hurt to see with my own eyes that these venerable documents of my youth, which influenced the style of the age, are not protected from deterioration in some public collection. There isn't a single sheet from that series in the Albertina, though there are drawings in another hand that have been falsely attributed to me by the Schiele supporters who work there, as I recently discovered in Basel.

Worse still, someone has had the audacity to take some of my irreplaceable pencil drawings and paint over them - or rather smear them - with gouache in the modern taste, which is to say in the taste of the Viennese genius hunters Rössler, Nierenstein, Köstler and so on, ostensibly to increase the market value of the drawings. One of these barbarically defaced drawings can now be seen at Mrs Bondi's in London. Holy Hitler!

Regarding Gurlitt: unfortunately I only received his letter when I returned from Vienna, where I had no time to seek him out in the country because I had far too much to do with the relief campaigns. I've just heard that I've managed to secure prostheses from abroad for almost six thousand young invalids who lost arms or legs in the war.

I'm very keen to have Gurlitt republish the following works:

1. Die Träumende Knaben / first edition, Wiener Werkstätte 1908

2. Der gefesselte Kolumbus / portfolio of lithographs, Berlin 1914, original dimensions

3. Bachkantate / Berlin 1916, original dimensions

All three portfolios with associated texts and, for the latter, the score of the Bach cantata of the same name if at all possible. He would also be doing me a great service if he were to reissue Paul Stefan's book Dramen und Bilder von Oskar Kokoschka [Plays and Pictures by Oskar Kokoschka], which was originally published in 1911 by Jahoda & Siegel in Vienna. It could prove to be an important reference for us all, particularly for young people in Austria, who don't know my work at all. Thanks to repeated exploitation by Rössler, Nierenstein and Köstler, Austria now has a whole bookstore of portfolios, pamphlets and booklets about the imitator of Klimt, Van Gogh and Kokoschka. Even Gurlitt publishes his work. That's why I wasn't especially interested when Gurlitt sent me his catalogue. You can send him the relevant parts of this letter. I was thinking of making him my Austrian agent, but there's no point having an Austria agent if he can't make this sort of distinction.

I don't have photos of the Stillleben mit Katze und Hasen [Still-Life with Cat and Hare] or Die Macht der Musik [The Power of Music]. On the portrait Karl Kraus II, 1925 (with the date and the following inscription on the back: 'Pro domo et mundo. The chair on which Karl Kraus sat for this portrait collapsed after the last sitting on 7 February 1925, and the joiner had to be called. From the wreckage of a world in which people were born with beams or barricades before their eyes, you took one plank for your writing table. O.K.') is depicted a metallic, shimmering blue butterfly from the species morpheus, an allusion to the fact that Kraus, like a monk, only ever wrote at night.

Die Entfesselung der Atomenergie [Atomic Energy Unchained] I shall describe for you orally when you come to London with the first part of the manuscript, which I hope will be soon, because now the flu is breaking out.

Best wishes,

OK

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