Letter from Oskar Kokoschka to J.P. Hodin

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[Translation/transcription]

15 July 1950

My dear Master Hodinus,

Yesterday I put the final touches (I want to say hatchet blows) to my ceiling painting, and now I don't know what to do with myself; I haven't felt this dejected for many, many years. Finishing something when you know you won't be able to change even the slightest detail is like being ambushed; you're no more prepared for it than you are for your own death. I'm deeply sad and raging against the whole world, trying to find reasons for my anger, perhaps that this work, an epic, a saga, should now become the property of an inglorious present and an even less glorious posterity, and that these cultural nitwits are free to do whatever they like with it. They, like flies, all prefer the two-dimensional life, while I've been weaving away in the cosmic space I've created for myself, day by day, for half a year, as long as I could stand up straight on these two legs, like the three Fates in one person. The picture that's dearest to me is of course the last, with Demeter, Persephone and Hades, because it was the last and because, in compositional terms, it completes the grand arc of the message I'm sending out into the void, organic in myth and form, as though it were always there waiting, from the very beginning, for those who have eyes to see. It's a small comfort to know that even Uccello, who invented perspective for the renaissance world, to meet a cultural need, was understood just as little. Instead of pursuing that cultural venture (as daring in its day as Columbus's search for the two Indias) they turned linear perspective into an academic formula which was then put in the service of the powerful by the day labourers who made 'modern' art in those days. Until Michelangelo again shook the pillars of this temple-turned-marketplace.

Please get in touch with Dr Bland (?), whom you know, to see to it that Count Seilern, 56 Exhibition Road, allows you to study my work in peace and without interruption, and that they lend you the excellent photographs and details taken by Mr Bell (the photographer at the Courtauld Institute). This is perhaps my last great work, possibly my best, and I don't think Seilern is fully aware of what he's got. He won't make it accessible, and from the stupid society people who come to see him he'll hear nothing but criticism until he puts it away in his glory hole - whereas anything churned out by the pilfering Picasso enjoys the protection of communists, democrats and Nazis alike.

All my love as ever.

Yours,

OK

Longing for your beautiful wife!


[Note on envelope:]

Title of the painting is 'The Promethean Saga'

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