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“Recasting,” of course, is meant to connote reinterpretation. But the slash is meant to suggest that Kokoschka also cast himself in different roles: as Achilles, as Tristan, as Christ, etc., and also to differentiate “Re” from “casting” as a pun on the fact that the bust on the cover of the book had never been cast in bronze.

Reading through the introduction it seems that the corrosion in politics is what stimulated the growth of new art forms and theories. Do you believe that artists would have developed these new forms and theories otherwise?

It is very difficult to speculate in general terms as to whether the influence of historical conditions is so direct as to completely preclude the appearance of certain art forms. That question, in my view, is best addressed on a case-by-case basis. The point of the introduction of my book, however, was less to make that claim than to argue that the enmity of the Viennese political sphere also spread to artistic politics, and that some artistic styles of the time reflected the key political debates of the day.

You mention that, when a person conducts a study they bring on an aspect of human interpretation and that even this study “reflect[s] current tendencies in art historical investigation.” What are these tendencies which you worked with and how did this affect your study?

The attitudes in current humanistic interpretation that affected my scholarship on Kokoschka most of all was the view that art should not necessarily be praised uncritically as a “work of genius,” but must also be understood in terms of the underlying philosophical, social, and political agendas the artist was attempting to bolster. These attitudes inevitably made me highly suspicious of any rhetorical claims for “truth” an artist such as Kokoschka was making.

Why were the artists so strongly banded together in distinct groups, fighting and criticizing each other, rather than being open to multiple interpretations of “truth” and the freedom that art is supposed to provide?

Avant-garde artists usually band together in order to find solace and support from an uncomprehending public. The trouble with advocating to have found truth, of course, is that, by necessity, anyone who disagrees with you must be put in the position of being in error. If you find yourself in a competitive environment, sometimes the temptation to brand your rivals or critics as having fallen from truth is simply too tempting a rhetorical device to avoid. This strategy, I believe, was adopted by the likes of Kokoschka, Loos, and Kraus.

In the conclusion you discuss Kokoschka’s transformation. Willi Wolfradt explains that, “everything that was once capricious, morbid, and distorted is now dissolved.” You ask the question, “how would Loos and Kraus interpret such a change?” I pose that question to you as well as, how would the rest of the artistic community have interpreted this transformation?

I don’t think it is as important to answer how Loos and Kraus would have interpreted the change in Kokoschka’s style as to underscore the dilemma this very change forced them to confront, especially after they had connected Kokoschka’s evocation of truth to a completely different style than the one he was practicing after WWI. If they did not praise his new style, it would mean no longer supporting an individual to whom they had become attached by bonds of friendship; if they did, it would mean no longer endorsing the idea for which they had argued so feverishly before: namely, that truth could be revealed in terms of style. I hope my book insinuates that not connecting any artistic style with truth would have spared them this conundrum.

“Wittgenstein implies that the very difference between a structural and ornamental property, or between a façade and reality, rests not on self-declaring properties or objective criteria, but is contaminated, at every turn, by the perspective bias of the individual making the distinction.” Have the aesthetic camps and their predecessors embraced this philosophy? What effect did these types of philosophies have on the various aesthetic camps?

My view is that most of the aesthetic camps did not embrace, nor were they affected, by such a philosophy. If they did, they would have been far more tolerant of one another, having realized that artistic truth, like beauty, is always in the eye of the beholder.

--Lorna Marie McManus

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