Letter from Oskar Kokoschka to J.P. Hodin

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[Translation/transcription]

Villeneuve

20 July 1963

My dear Master Hodinus,

If you reissue your really good book in other languages or in German, please could you make these two corrections, which are quite essential for me. You must insist that Appolioner, or whatever that fellow from the Biennale is called, should purge his text of the mendacious propaganda for Schiele. I never saw or befriended him, I didn't study at the same school as him and I was not his 'comrade'. Rather, he was a bloody imitator of Klimt and me, and a pornographer to boot, and it has also been proven that after the Art Show where I exhibited my work he showed drawings at a later Art Show that attracted no further attention because they were far closer to Viennese tastes, mere imitations, confected and sexy! This also happens to be why the Italians like it. The second thing is the absurd letter from, I think, Hoppe, who remembers nothing but my burgundy silk pyjamas and, by the way, offends my knight's honour by publishing gossip about my departure from Stockholm. As a neutral Swede, whose country supplies the most modern weapons to both sides in every world war and conveys military secrets left and right even as it calls upon others to protect its 'neutrality' where necessary, somehow this good Swede doesn't see anything wrong in writing about me as though I'd asked him to release me from active military service. These Swedes have such a morbid fear of life that they sterilise everything, they'd like to wrap everything up in plastic and commit suicide en masse, which would be completely inconceivable in a slum district like Naples, for instance. The poor fellow has no imagination and can't even recall the wonderful picture of Stockholm I painted while I was half dead. He didn't for a moment consider buying it, even for next to nothing, which would have been a huge help to me given the hopeless love affair I was having at the time (not that the Swede would have understood anything about that). Read the letter with his recollections first, then read what I have to tell you about the episode, and perhaps you can jog his memory.

In the winter of 1917 (?) I was ordered by Austrian Command to leave the hospital in Vienna and go to Stockholm, where there was an Austrian Nobel Prize winner who specialised in my type of headshot. In a way he was doing his duty too, albeit necessarily in Stockholm, where they had a modern medical institute that specialised in his particular line of work. This man was called Dr Baranyi, and Hoppe had about as much prior knowledge of him and his institute as I had of the existence of abstract painting. I arrived and was treated in his clinic for weeks as an interesting test case, a sort of guinea pig. Had he been able to cure me it would have been economically significant for the Austrian Army, which then wouldn't have had to pay out full invalidity pensions after the war (once the war was lost, no-one expected to pay or receive such pensions anyway). So Hoppe didn't call Dr Baranyi on the last day to release me from military service and take me into his care. For a long time I had refused the futile treatment because it seemed as hopeless and torturous as the treatment I received in Vienna. Each week the doctor had to artificially induce brain convulsions by spinning me around at speed on a rotating chair, which meant I was forced to take a week's bed rest in a dark room until the convulsions stopped. Then, at a reception at the German embassy, I saw a Swedish Countess Karin X, to whom I was introduced by Ambassador von Incius. We fell forever in love at first sight and then spent every night secretly sailing up and down on a skerry boat for hours on end, until the countess's mother finally consented to us also meeting officially, at her house. The countess had just been widowed. Her husband, a Swedish cavalry officer, had died from a brain disease having spent years in a madhouse. After that I sent her a huge bouquet of black roses each day. This went on for a while and we started to think about an engagement. Then came the setbacks at the front, and my lieutenant's salary, which I was still withdrawing regularly in Stockholm, started to shrink as the money devalued. On the main square in Stockholm there was a sort of currency barometer, like the weather barometers you see in gardens in other cities. But this instrument showed the daily values of the currencies of all the belligerents, and the Austrian one, which was of most interest to me, fell rapidly. I looked up at it each day with a heavy heart on my way back from Moserbacken, where I was painting my picture of the harbour in Stockholm. I'd just about finished it when I handed over the last of my money to buy one last bouquet for my beautiful princess, then I had to tell her that I'd decided to leave. With tears in her eyes she implored me to stay. She wanted to live with me and share her life with me. I couldn't accept, of course, but I had tried to convince Dr Baranyi to sign me off as fully invalidated for army purposes (active service was out of the question by this point, though I might have ended up pushing pens in some bureau, causing chaos with my total ineptitude at such things). And so I travelled to Vienna and on to the Isonzo front, where I attached myself to a Hungarian regiment and managed to evade the bureau heroes in Vienna until a bomb exploded in our trench and the ambulance found me with shell shock. So it was that I ended up at a military hospital in Dresden, completely unfit for military service. The countess continued to write wonderful letters for a long time afterwards, but then married a very famous German pilot. This is a true account of what happened. Copy it for Hoppe, whose letter should be destroyed.

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