From Kokoschka to Jennerjahn

The city of Salzburg was aglow last summer with a magnificent production of Mozart's Magic Flute. To help usher in the Mozart year with style, the Austrians commissioned Oskar Kokoschka to design sets for the opera. The sets were a great success, and so was an extensive exhibit of Kokoschka's work at the Residenz Museum. Seventy year old Kokoschka was as bold as ever and from the looks of the large dramatic canvasses, sprawling with jotted forms and gushing color, gayer than usual. There was still a message but Kokoschka was definitely concentrating less on ideology and more on painting. This week some of the earlier works of the great Austrian Expressionist are on exhibit at the Gropper Galleries.

Particularly unusual for Kokoschka are the small naturalistic color lithographs designed as post cards for the Vienna Werkstatte in 1907 and typical of the art nouveau a decorative style popular in the late Victorian era.

Kokoshka did not employ this style for long. Working in Vienna at the same time Freud was elaborating the theories of psychoanalysis, he executed a striking series of portraits which resemble flights into the subconscious, and which mark his departure into expressionism.

The Bach Cantata lithographs from these early years reveal the characteristic features of Kokoschka's style. They are animated and mysterious, expressing the artist's belief that "man is a magical thing, full of magical powers." Every line has meaning--the intersecting lines of force and the curling gestures create a mood of tension. A self-portrait in this series, similar to one owned by the Museum of Modern Art, shows Kokoschka pointing to his chest. He considers this portrait prophetic, since he was wounded in this spot a few years later during the first World War.

Kokoschka's many other portraits are nervous and feverish. They look hurried. Twenty sanguine drawings, six of which are shown, were actually done in one evening. Kokoschka, however, is not concerned with the external aspects of his subjects so much as with the strange lines of their inner personalities. The results are haunting.

In spite of what may be called a broad style, Kokoschka is aware of details, even of what appear to be insignificant things like the way the line of the eyelid moves into the angle of the nose. Kokoschka explains, "I will teach them to see again; this is the faculty lost to modern society."

Expressionism is know for its despair, sometimes impressively tragic, at other times excessively neurotic or sentimental. It is a style that conveys deep emotional reaction to experience. It is never merely pretty and rarely intellectually sterile. This exhibit shows again that Kokoschka is one of its greatest exponents.

At the Boylston Street Print Gallery are paintings and stained glass by Warren Jennerjahn, a young artist who succeeded Paul Albers in the Art Department at Black Mountain College. Like Albers, Jennerjahn is an heir of the de stijl movement. His paintings show a Neo-Plastic preference for horizontal and vertical themes. The development of this kind of painting out of cubism is shown in the transition from a fairly realistic housetop view to a small painting of a studio window in which the qualities of design begin to take command. Most of Jennerjahn's other paintings consider the canvas as a plane and the paint applied to it also a flat surface. The overriding concern is the relation of colors and lines in the plane. Like Mondrian, Jennerjahn aims at purity through the reduction of means. The curved line, spatial illusions, tricks of the brush are all given up. Design rather than texture is the keynote.

Three of the works in this exhibition depart from the Neo-Plastic tendency for a foray into Neo-Impressionism. A series of sunsets are in the pointillist style. The illusion of light and warmth produced by the use of light and color is spoiled by a clinical and sterile application of paint.

More exciting effects with light and color are produced in the stained glass that adorns the gallery windows. Experimenting with the stained glass medium, Jennerjahn often abandons the use of lead between the frames of color to get an unusual blend and softness of light. At other times he paints the glass instead of baking in the colors. This produces unusual designs to complement vibrant colors. Jennerjahn's painting tends to be academic. Where so much theory is involved there is hardly enough room for expression. The stained glass seems to be less forced and more alive.