Letter from Oskar Kokoschka to J.P. Hodin

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[Translation/transcription]

Herbert Read also gets cocktails and fine dining at the Haus der Kunst - not just at the Biennale! Is he coming???

Villeneuve

22 March 1958

Dear Master Hodinus,

[illegible] too much traipsing around to see and describe the 'modern' and the 'contemptible contemporary' art, you simply must go to Munich with the (beautyful one) to have a look at my life's work, all fifty-three years of it. You'll need at least three days to see it all!

Have Goldschmidt, Goldscheider or the Burlington Magazine, whoever usually does it, send you to visit this exhibition of work by the last living painter, after whom the chimpanzees at the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Darwinians of the future can be as dogmatic as they like about what's art and what's not. Later on, when society has gathered around the sputniks, you'll have to have seen this gigantic oeuvre if you want to say you knew the last painter of creative force, one who didn't steal from archaic exotic cultures or plunder the stone age caves or parasitise the Australian Aboriginals, one who didn't follow the dogmas dreamt up by the art writers, who also bear responsibility for the thousand isms that the art dealers and the art magazines have been trotting out for the last thirty years. From the beginning, i.e. from 1906, until my untimely death (?) I was the only representative of my generation in the world who spoke his own language and who might now be capable of revolutionising, for instance, the whole 'non-objective' society in Germany. Just read the outraged opinion pieces by the blowhard art critics. I gave six radio interviews, one speech to three hundred reporters and a colour slide lecture on my Thermopylae, which has just been bought by Hamburg University for a huge sum of money.

But now I have pneumonia. My last love to the beautyful one, and get to Munich or I shall never see her again!

So long, all my love.

Yours,

OK

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