King of the Castle

Perched atop a hill 500 feet above the Austrian city of Salzburg (pop. 100,096), the Hohensalzburg Fortress looks for all the world like a candy castle in some fairy tale. A tiny railway scrambles to the top, and tourists flock to the terrace for a breath of mountain air and a view of the Salzburg valley below. Last week the tourists had an extra surprise in store for them. Oskar Kokoschka, one of the most furious individualists in modern art (TIME, July 12, 1948), had taken over the barracks of the old fortress for a summer art school, and was making it echo like a nest of angry young eagles.

At 67, Painter Kokoschka is just as lively as ever, a leathery, vigorous extrovert who likes nothing better than tilting at established institutions. He expects to have the time of his life in Salzburg with his 40 students. During his month-long course, financed by the provincial government, he has no intention of teaching his pupils how to paint in any classroom course. Says Kokoschka: "I will teach them how to see again. This is a faculty lost to modern society."

Patches for Pants. Austrian-born Oskar Kokoschka, whom Hitler once called the most degenerate of all European artists, follows no set school, and he is at war with all who do. Most of the time he works with brutal vigor, painting fierce nudes, expressionistic portraits, or turbulent landscapes done with flailing, cutlasslike strokes of his brush and furnace-bright colors. "Nobody else can do these things," he cries, pointing to the tortured convolutions on a nude drawing. "Who would dare? I am a being with antenna. I receive with my senses." But when the mood is right, he can turn to exquisite watercolor flowers, little "finger exercises" done with a delicate brush and a gardener's calm appreciation.

Kokoschka finds such versatility all too uncommon these days. Everyone tends to become uniform--either abstract or academic. "In the U.S.," he grumbles, "people can't get jobs unless they paint abstractions. It is that constant repetition! You have to drink Budweiser beer, you have to drink Budweiser beer. After two days I had to drink Budweiser beer--and I don't even like beer." Says Kokoschka, waving an abstract catalogue: "This man makes patches for the pants. I say man is a magical thing, full of magical powers. This cold-way art leads to evil--it makes art inhuman. I know the individual is doomed, but as long as I live, I stand on my own legs."

Grass for Life. If Kokoschka's students at Salzburg carry away one-tenth of his fiery individualism, he will be happy. This winter he will stay in Switzerland to work on a huge (52 1/2 ft. by 10 ft.) painting of the battle of Thermopylae ("against barbarism, against uniformity") for the University of Hamburg. In the spring he will go to India to paint, and eventually, when he tires of travel, wander back to his London apartment. He has no studio; he likes to paint landscapes out in the open air, portraits at the subject's home.

Kokoschka paints slowly these days, sometimes only two oils a year. There is never enough for a show, because his admirers buy them immediately for prices up to $3,000. But the high prices don't seem to interest Kokoschka. "With me," he says, "these are not wares. They are my life. A blade of grass is more interesting than the president of a republic if you put your heart into it."

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