Realistic distortions, subject specific style, and the relative
representational range of drawing and photography
Oskar Kokoschka on Karl Kraus (and vice-versa)
Klaus Speidel
Abstract
Karl Kraus’s favourable and conceptually complex comments of the portrait drawings by Oskar Kokoschka in 1910 put us on the trail of a host of different phenomena of pictorial representation. Based on close-readings of several aphorisms by Kraus and drawings by Kokoschka, I propose that realistic distortion can be distinguished from its defamatory
counterpart, and that the traditional concepts of style cannot account for all essential stylistic
variations that are important in pictures. I argue that we need to introduce the concept of
subject specific style. This must be distinguished from other concepts such as signature style. I
try to show how these conceptual distinctions are connected to the difference in
representational range displayed by media that are based on traces, like photography, and by
media based on testimony, like drawing or writing. Résumé
En 1910, Oskar Kokoschka produit une série de dessins pour la revue expressionniste berlinoise Der Sturm. L’un des portraits représente le satiriste Karl Kraus, un autre l’architecte Adolf Loos. Au même moment, Kraus fait paraître une série d’aphorismes qui commentent le travail de Kokoschka. Kraus part du travail de Kokoschka pour arriver à des principes généraux sur la représentation picturale. Une analyse des réflexions de l’écrivain et des deux dessins faits par Kokoschka nous permet non seulement de mieux comprendre comment un dessin peut saisir le caractère d’un modèle au-delà du physique, mais aussi de forger des concepts pour enrichir les notions de style traditionnelles. Nous soutenons dans notre article qu’il faut introduire l’idée d’un style à l’œuvre pour compléter les notions de style habituelles. Le style à l’œuvre peut être spécifique au sujet traité. Nous montrons en particulier comment le dessin permet des distorsions réalistes, difficiles à obtenir dans des médias basés sur la trace comme la photographie.
Keywords
Karl Kraus, Oskar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Der Sturm, Die Fackel, realistic distortion, expressionism, caricature, representational range, trace, testimony, 1910
Karl Kraus’s favourable and conceptually complex comments of the portrait drawings by Oskar Kokoschka in 1910 put us on the trail of a host of different phenomena of pictorial representation. In this paper, I propose that realistic distortion can be distinguished from its defamatory
counterpart, and that the traditional concepts of style cannot account for all essential stylistic
variations that are important in pictures1. I argue that we need to introduce the concept of subject specific style. This must be distinguished from other concepts such as signature style. I try to show
how these conceptual distinctions are connected to the difference in representational range displayed by media that are based on traces, like photography, and by media based on testimony, like drawing or writing2.
We will set out from an aphoristic comment on a portrait of himself by Kokoschka, where Karl Kraus states his ideal of the art of portraiture. Our detailed analysis of several aphorisms and a comparison of the drawing of Kraus with a drawing that depicts Adolf Loos, will show how drawing can reveal aspects of a personality. We can then give clear content to the vague thesis that some portraits show more about the sitters than photographs – or in some cases the persons themselves – do. The analysis of a particularly perspicacious satire in which Kraus defends himself against a caricature-drawing will further clarify the representational range of drawing as opposed to photography.
The close analysis of both Kraus’s aphorisms and Kokoschka’s drawings will show the subtlety with which both the young painter and the seasoned writer use their respective media around 1910. Kraus’s writing turns out to be so conceptual that his conclusions resemble those that can be obtained with the fine-grained tools of today’s analytic philosophy of pictures.
1. The first picture on Die Fackel
As yet, not very much has been published concerning the relationship between Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) and Karl Kraus (1874-1936). The two main articles on the encounter between these two important figures of the Viennese avant-garde were written by Leo Lensing and published in German in 1986 and 1988, respectively. They focus on the personal and biographical aspects of the relationship. Lensing starts with history and makes conceptual conjectures to explain why Kraus
1. As I realized before submitting the final draft of my article, the concept of “realistic distortion” was used by Anton Ehrenzweig in 1967 to describe a phenomenon very close to the one that is at stake here. While he does not conceptualize it explicitly in his text, he assembles several visual examples under this heading, including a Greek vase, an Egyptian relief, caricatures by James Gillray and George Cruikshank, a painting by Paul Klee (Ein neues Gesicht) and two works by Alberto Giacometti (cf. The Hidden Order of Art. A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968, Figs. 7-11, cf. also Notes 43 and 64 below).
2. Both “trace” and “testimony” are here used in the technical sense defined by Gregory Currie which I will make explicit below.
ceases to take interest in Kokoschka around 1914. My own study focuses on visual, literary and conceptual analysis of the drawings and the aphorisms.
Lensing notes that Kraus begins publishing photographic representations of himself when Kokoschka paints his first portrait of the satirist3. He deduces that Kraus’s “systematic use” of
photographs in his satirical journal Die Fackel (The Torch) was determined by Kokoschka’s influence4. This idea, which is his main thesis, is not, however, supported by any argument and I
find it unconvincing. First of all it is not evident why contact with a painter should have induced Kraus to use photography. This conjecture ignores the essential differences between media (which Kraus and Kokoschka were aware of). As we will see, Kraus believed that photography is less able to show the real self of a person than drawing or painting is, and Kokoschka insisted on the importance of models being present for drawing and painting5. The use of satirical drawings by
Kraus would thus have appeared as a more natural consequence of his interaction with Kokoschka. It is also surprising to note that Kraus only starts using pictures in his journal in 1914, at a moment when his contact with the painter had become very weak and not already in 1910 when he got to know Kokoschka – or, to allow for some maturation, in 1911 or 1912. The fact is that Kraus was interested in the growing presence and power of images long before he came to know the painter6.
In 1909, he published a text called “Die Welt der Plakate” (The World of Billboards) (cf. F 283, 1909, 19-25)7. And the one picture that was present since Kraus started Die Fackel is even more
telling. It is the frontispiece of the first edition in 1899, which was indeed a remarkably subtle work of visual art (Fig.1)8. From the torch that has taken the place of the sun through the clouds that hide
the city to the masks that allude to satire as well as the Maskenball which Viennese society had become in the eyes of Kraus and many other intellectuals, the iconic symbolism of the picture is so rich that it is difficult to imagine that Kraus had no notion of pictorial rhetoric. The clouds that hide the city hint at Vienna as Kraus sees it: a city in cultural and intellectual decline, a city of fading light.
3. Cf. Leo A. LENSING, “Gesichter und Gesichte: Kokoschka, Kraus und der Expressionismus”, in Erika PATKA (ed.),
OSKAR KOKOSCHKA. Symposion abgehalten von der Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, Salzburg, 1986 (from now on: Gesichter), 131.
4. Cf. Gesichter, 145-146.
5. A letter to Kraus (Berlin-Halensee 26. Dezember 1910) in which Herwarth Walden asks Kraus to pay for a trip which would allow Oskar Kokoschka to draw Samuel Lublinski who had died the same day can count as one of many illustrations of this tendency (cf. George C. AVERY (ed.), Feinde in Scharen. Ein wahres Vergnügen dazusein.
Karl Kraus – Herwarth Walden. Briefwechsel 1909-1912, Göttingen, Wallstein Verlag, 2002, 283). 6. Cf. Gesichter, 128.
7. When quoting Kraus’s Die Fackel, I stick to the common convention of quoting number, year and page preceded by “F” (the complete corpus of Die Fackel (1899-1936) is now online: http://corpus1.aac.ac.at/fackel/).
8. Quite surprisingly, neither Edward Timms, who first attracted my attention to the drawing, nor I have been able to find out who is the author of the frontispiece.
The way in which the rays of light fall to the front of the picture evokes theatre. It might underline the artificiality of Vienna’s high society, but it is also the stage where Karl Kraus will raise his own interpretation of the Welttheater. In a famous obituary, Alfred Polgar insists on the fact that Kraus made his enemies, in the creative sense of the verb to make9. Even if Kraus precisely
names real persons, they become personages in his writing: “The real truths are those that you can invent.”10
This interpretation of the frontispiece as a devastating image of Vienna as well as one which gives a messianic place to the journal may sound slightly strange and exaggerated to those who are not acquainted with the writings of Karl Kraus. But it reflects the understanding that Kraus himself had of what he was doing as well as the way in which his work was perceived by many of his fellow-citizens. It is certain that Kraus’s relation with his Vienna is quite complex, but as the following aphorism illustrates it is very violent : “A city in which men say of a former virgin that
9. Polgar’s reading of this text precedes the recordings of readings of Kraus’s texts by the author: Karl KRAUS, Karl
Kraus Liest Aus Eigenen Schriften, Preisner Records, 1999.
10. Karl KRAUS, Pro Domo et Mundo, in Beim Wort genommen, München, Kösel Verlag, 1955, 298: “Die waren
Wahrheiten sind die, welche man erfinden kann.” Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are by the author.
Fig.1: Author unknown, Die Fackel (Frontispiece), No. 1, April 1899.
she ‘has given it away’, should be erased from the earth.”11
Die Fackel was so important for Kraus that he eventually chose to become its single
contributor. The fact that Kraus used such a rich and complex image for the first edition of his journal shows the profound understanding of the power of pictures he already had in 1899 – at a time when Oskar Kokoschka was still a thirteen year-old schoolboy.
Kraus’s sensibility for complex pictorial representation is something we ought to keep in mind when we hear him repeat that he knows a lot about art, but does not understand anything about painting12. As will soon become clear, Kraus definitely believed that he was able to judge
artistic quality wherever it was to be found. He maintained the frontispiece for 81 editions of Die
Fackel. It might well be for copyright reasons that the writer did away with it when he changed his
editor13.
2. Kraus on Kokoschka: the ideal of a portrait
In 1908, the architect Adolf Loos (1870-1933), by then probably Kraus’s best friend, gets to know Oskar Kokoschka. Kokoschka will soon come to represent an ideal of the clear-sighted, daring artist for Loos14. He helps the young artist as much as his modest fortune allows. Loos recommends
Kokoschka to many of his friends and promises to buy the portraits they reject. As Werner Schweiger notes, this made him “the greatest collector of Kokoschka’s paintings ever”15. It is most
likely that it is Loos who introduced Kokoschka to Karl Kraus. In 1909, Kraus orders a portrait from him. Kokoschka later tells us how he painted Kraus in his apartment while the writer was having a lively discussion with Loos16. In 1925, Kokoschka painted a second portrait of Kraus in
order to replace the first painting which had been lost, probably when it was on loan for an exhibition. In an article on Kokoschka’s paintings, Edward Timms provides an interesting interpretation of both the portrait and Kokoschka’s inscription on the back of it17. I will here
11. Karl KRAUS, “Sprüche und Widersprüche”, in Beim Wort genommen, 138: “Eine Stadt, in der die Männer von der
Jungfrau, die es nicht mehr ist, den Ausdruck gebrauchen, sie habe 'es hergegeben', verdient dem Erdboden gleichgemacht zu werden.”
12. Cf. F 339, 1911, 22: “Ich verstehe wahrscheinlich von Malerei weniger als jeder einzelne von jenen, die das Zeug haben, sich von berufswegen täuschen zu lassen, aber von der Kunst sicher mehr als sie alle zusammen.” (“I probably understand less about painting than each of those who have been endowed with the right to be mislead by profession, but more about art than all of them taken together. ”)
13. It is again Edward Timms who told me about the legal problems when Kraus changed his editors and suggested this possibility to me.
14. Interestingly, Loos who famously rejected ornament (and art) in everyday objects, seemed to adhere to the nearly messianic vision of the artist which characterizes early expressionism.
15. Werner J. SCHWEIGER, Der junge Kokoschka. Leben und Werk 1904-1914, Wien & München, Brandstätter, 1983, 8.
16. Cf. Oskar KOKOSCHKA, My Life, Translation: David Britt, New York, 1974.
17. Cf. Edward TIMMS, “Kokoschka’s pictographs – a contextual reading”, in Word & Image, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1990,
concentrate on one of the first drawings. It is not only the excellence of the drawing that justifies this choice: it allows us to confront a work by Kokoschka and Kraus’s judgement of it. Kraus initially shared Loos’s enthusiasm about the young painter18: “Kokoschka has made my portrait. It
might well be that those who know me will not recognize me. But those who do not know me certainly will.”19
This is the only time Kraus comments on a specific Kokoschka portrait. To understand the meaning of the aphorism it is not essential which of the four existing portraits Kraus is actually talking about. After all, the aphorism was published as a stand-alone text in Die Fackel and in Pro
Domo et Mundo20. Kraus is playing on an ambivalence that is inherent in the verb “to recognize”.
We may recognize someone from having seen him or her before or we may recognize someone as having certain characteristics. Furthermore, the German verb erkennen is of the same family as
Erkenntnis. And Erkenntnis simply means insight (religious, scientific or other). Now, with two
occurrences and two different ways of understanding “to recognize”, we have four possible readings, three of which are not meaningless.
A second aphorism almost immediately follows our aphorism in Pro Domo et Mundo, a collection of his aphorisms that Kraus prepared in 1912: “His paintings are dissimilar. None of the portraits, but all the originals have been recognized.”21 Kraus here distinguishes physiological
“Ähnlichkeit” (resemblance or similarity) and a more profound kind of resemblance in representation. The notion of similarity and the immediate opposition of recognizing the portrait and recognizing the original make it clear that the correct reading for the first aphorism is the more flattering for Kokoschka, who is held to show the essence of the sitter.
Interestingly, this second aphorism was first published in Die Fackel 300, 1910, 25, a few months after the first aphorism. On this first occasion Kraus had written “OK” instead of “His”. OK
18. Kraus was later irritated by Kokoschka’s insistence on publishing (as Kraus believed) bad literature and was shocked by Kokoschka’s use of his military service as a marketing device (he published for example a postcard picturing him as a wounded soldier). Lensing’s second article, “‘Dies unbefugte Doppelleben’ Karl Kraus über die Doppelbegabung von Oskar Kokoschka”, in SCHLEICHL & WAGENKNECHT (ed.), Kraus Hefte 47, München, 1988,
focuses on this debate. Edward Timms’ article for Word & Image (art. cit.) shows resonances of Kokoschka’s literary production in his visual work and vice-versa.
19. The first reference is to the first publication in Die Fackel. The second to the republication by Kraus in Pro Domo et Mundo as given in the re-edition of Kraus’s three books of aphorisms by Kösel (Beim Wort genommen, 1955). (F 300, 25, 1910 et Pro Domo et Mundo, 254/255).
20. Given the historical details, the most likely real-world reference is the drawing I discuss here . The aphorism was published in F300 1910, which appeared on April 4. 1910. Just a month later (on May 6.), Kraus and Kokoschka sent a postcard to Walden, who had ordered the drawing for his journal Der Sturm, where they explain how it should be published (cf. Note 35 below).
21. Karl KRAUS, Pro Domo et Mundo, in Beim Wort genommen, 255: “Er malt unähnlich. Man hat keines seiner
are not only Kokoschka’s initials. He also used these two letters to sign his paintings. It is thus beyond dispute that the aphorism refers to Kokoschka. Kraus’s modification of the text for its second publication shows that he believed in the universal dimension of what he said about a specific painter. On a general level, it does not matter much if Kraus is speaking of Kokoschka or another painter. It is the fact that a phenomenon exists that is important – or as Kraus has it: “The name cannot always be mentioned. Not that someone did it, but that it was possible, must be said.”22
Generalizing the aphorism, we can thus formulate the paradoxical statement that there are painters who know how to make dissimilar drawings that allow to recognize the people they represent. The two aphorisms taken together formulate Kraus’s ideal for portrait painting. And his could be the most concise expression of an aim that “Expressionist” writers and painters shared with Karl Kraus. Many expressionists affirm that they want to penetrate the surface of things (and persons) in order to see what lies beneath. The personality of an artist is not important because it will give way to some distorted idiosyncratic vision, but insofar as it allows her to see more than common mortals23.
The first aphorism may then be (somewhat poorly) paraphrased: Those who know me will not recognize me. The portrait does not resemble me. But those who are not focused on what I look like physically may through this portrait understand who I am.
Now, let me make myself clear : I share the suspicion which many of you may feel reading this kind of idea about art as revelation. But I also feel in tune with Ernst Gombrich when, after criticizing “the sentimental talk about artists painting souls” he affirms: “when all is said and done, a great portrait […] does give us the illusion of seeing the face behind the mask.”24 And like
Gombrich, I want to find out how precisely this illusion (if indeed it is only an illusion) comes into being. How exactly does a dissimilar portrait drawing enable us to recognize the sitter?
3. Kokoschka on Kraus: an ideal portrait
Let us now look at the object we have seen to be the concrete manifestation of the ideal of portrait painting Karl Kraus defends (Fig. 2)25. The drawing is supposed to give an insight into Kraus’s
personality even though it may not be more commonly recognizable as his portrait. How exactly
22. F 272, 1909, 44: “Nicht immer darf ein Name genannt werden. Nicht, dass einer es getan hat, sondern dass es möglich war, soll gesagt sein.”
23. Cf. for example Kasimir EDSCHMID, “Über den dichterischen Expressionismu”, in Über den Expressionismus in der
Literatur und die neue Dichtung, Berlin, E. Reiss, 1919.
24. Ernst H. GOMBRICH, “The Mask and the face”, in Ernst H. GOMBRICH, Julian HOCHBERG and Max BLACK (eds.), Art,
Perception and Reality, Baltimore & London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, 42. Gombrich seems to use “illusion” in a non-technical sense, in order to emphasize that we do not really know if we see the face.
25. The portrait was published on the 19th of May 1910 in the brand-new magazine Der Sturm. The edition contained an explicit homage to Karl Kraus and his Die Fackel. It raised great public interest and was republished several times.
does it do so26?
Kokoschka’s drawing is characterized by fairly wild brushstrokes. Some of them are zigzags. To better explain these elements it is useful to distinguish between depiction and representation27. Depiction as I use it here is a narrower notion than representation. A drawing of a
skull depicts a skull, but may represent death. “Equally, a painting may depict a lamb, and the lamb may represent the man Christ; but it does not depict the man Christ.”28 Elements that do not depict
anything at all, however, may still represent without necessarily being conventional symbols. This seems to be at stake when we say that an abstract painting shows sadness, or in W. J. T. Mitchell’s comment on Kasimir Malevich’s composition commonly known as Black Square and Red Square (1915), which depicts a tilted red square below a larger black square: “The relation of black square to red square is not just the relation between abstract opposites like stability and tilt, large and small, but of more potent, ideologically charged associations like ‘deadly black and vivid, revolutionary red, domination and resistance’”29. One could indeed be tempted to say that the
painting represents domination and resistance, while it depicts only a red and a black square in certain positions. It then is clear that visual forms need not depict objects (as in the case of the lamb or the skull) in order to be able to represent something. And even Jackson Pollock says: “I don’t care for ‘abstract expressionism...’ and it is certainly not objective’, and not ‘non-representational’ either. I’m very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time.”30
What I am interested in is how elements that do not unambiguously depict anything can come to represent something. It seems to us that the difference between depiction and representation can indeed help us make sense of Kraus’s paradox, which could then be reformulated thus: “A good painter can draw portraits that do not depict their sitters very well, but that are very good representations of them”. And one way to do so is to use abstract qualities of the medium – in our case drawing and painting – to represent aspects of a person that would not appear in a drawing that had great visual resemblance. This affirmation does not imply that visual dissimilarity is a condition for successful representation. Many artists have achieved resemblance and have still been able to
26. In the first aphorism, Kraus chose to speak of recognition instead of resemblance. This is interesting in view of later developments in the theory of depiction where simple resemblance as a condition for depiction has been criticised (cf. Nelson GOODMAN, “Reality Remade: A denotation theory of representation”, in Philip A. ALPERSON (ed.),
Philosophy of the Visual Arts, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992, 88-102). Recognition in a vision oriented (as opposed to object oriented) theory of depiction has since come to be considered a more promising notion.
27. Cf. Christopher PEACOCKE, “Depiction”, in The Philosophical Review, Vol. 96, No. 3, 1987, 383.
28. Ibidem.
29. W. J. Thomas MITCHELL, “Ut Pictura Theoria : Abstract Painting and Language”, in Picture Theory. Essays on
Verbal and Visual Representation, Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 1994, 226. 30. Seldon RODMAN, Conversations with Artists, New York, Devin-Adair, 1961, 84.
represent inner qualities or to comment on the sitter. This would also explain the limits of photography for portraiture: insofar as a photograph is a visual trace of the person it depicts, it seems more difficult to go beyond the visible when taking a photographic picture31.
I think this is the point Rosa Berland makes in her article about Kokoschka’s approach to portraiture. She is interested in how Kokoschka “uses painterly technique to focus on the narrative of inner movement”32. The abstract backgrounds of his paintings, where brushstrokes are apparent,
help him, as Berland has it, show his sitters’ psychologies33.
While there is no unified background in his drawings, Kokoschka explicitly asked that the “contingencies (pencil strokes)” be maintained in the reproduction of the Kraus drawing34. He
31. Artists like Stieglitz tried to extend the representational range of photography at the time Kokoschka and Kraus were active.
32. Rosa BERLAND, “The Early Portraits of Oskar Kokoschka: A Narrative of Inner Life”, in Image & Narrative, No. 18,
2007. [On line]: http://www.imageandnarrative.be/thinking_pictures/berland.htm. 33. Ibidem.
34. Cf. Oskar Kokoschka’s letter to H. Walden, 6/5/1910, quoted by Werner J. SCHWEIGER, 43, with comments by both
Karl Kraus and Kokoschka: “L. H. W. Bitte verkleinern sie die Zeichnung, womöglich nicht (oder nur wenig), Original dem Cassirer bitte zur Ausstellung geben, zur Reproduktion alle Zufälligkeiten (Bleistriche) drauflassen. […] Ihr O Kokoschka Zeichnung – ein Meisterwerk! – muß aufgezogen werden. Viele [?] Grüße K.K.”. Of course Kokoschka’s talk of “contingencies (pencil strokes)” is ambivalent. On the one hand, it shows that Kokoschka considered the strokes an important element of his drawing, on the other he does not seem to give them a precise meaning. For my interpretation, the fact that Kokoschka speaks of random strikes would only be a problem if I wanted to defend that Kokoschka had a conscious specific intention for the meaning of every element of his drawing. I do not, however, believe this.
Fig.2: Oskar Kokoschka, Karl Kraus, published in Der Sturm, No. 10, May 19, 1910.
probably refers to the strokes to Kraus’s left. As for the two signs below Kraus’s mouth, it is also not clear what they are supposed to depict and we will have to see if they can represent something on a more abstract level. A good candidate might be speech. It seems likely that the elements of drawing around the figure of Kraus fulfilled part of the function that Berland places in the paintings’ backgrounds. The other part might then be found in the figure, the lines of the drawing that depict Karl Kraus himself.
But before we move deeper to the level of abstract brushstrokes and pencil, I should complete the description of what the painting depicts: the hands seem to be those of someone talking. The right hand seems to have moved so much that the painter has been unable to keep it entirely in the picture and its pose remains unnatural. Kraus’s look is very tender. Using Michael Fried’s terminology, we might even say that Kraus is absorbed35. Badly shaved and with a prisoner’s
haircut, he is wearing glasses and is bowing to the front very much like some saint in a medieval painting would do. The long fingers of his left hand are tense and their posture is not quite natural and very hard to imitate.
4. Kokoschka on Loos: a different style for a different subject
When we talk of style in painting, there are two different ways in which we may talk about it. There are two different conceptions of style. There is the conception that we use when we talk of general style, and there is the conception that we use when we talk of individual style. […] General style comes in different forms […]. Universal style, period style, school style – all this is general style, and general style contrasts with individual style, which comes in only one form. Individual style is the style of an individual painter.36
I would like to suggest that individual style can also come in more than one form – and that it does with Kokoschka.
A comparison of Kokoschka’s of Kraus with his drawing of Loos, made at the same moment and also for Der Sturm shows that the style of the Kraus drawing – far from being merely in “Kokoschka’s manner” – is specific to this drawing (Fig. 3)37. Kokoschka has accorded much more
space to the figure of Loos and some less essential parts of Loos’s body are not represented. While it is true that the spectator quite unconsciously completes the drawing, what is really depicted is a
35. Cf. Michael FRIED, Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Berkeley, University
of California Press, 1980.
36. Richard WOLLHEIM, Painting as an Art, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1987, 26.
37. The question of how the how and the who are connected in Kokoschka’s work remains open in Berland’s essay and she sometimes makes it sound like the painter was simply applying “a system” in all his portraits.
left hand that is detached from the rest of the body and a head without its back38. What is even more
remarkable if we compare the two portraits is the sharpness and clarity of the lines in the drawing of the architect. They are more precise and vary much less in boldness than those of the other drawing: it could be said that the lines are of architectural or engineer-like precision. Loos’s whole body is turned away from us, while the writer turns his body towards us and only his head is turned away. Just like Kraus, Loos seems absorbed by a specific activity. In his case, we know exactly what it is: he is occupied by drawing. But even though his left hand seems to hold a paper, we see neither drawing nor paper. This might just be another case of incompletion of the drawing, much like the missing back of Loos’s head, but like the first absence this second one might also be more meaningful. There is indeed a paper involved: the paper the drawing is made on itself. As it seems, the drawing Kokoschka did of Loos plays with the idea of itself being an auto-portrait. Kokoschka suggests that his drawing is one that Loos might have made of himself. The fine and precise lines are like those used by architects and the instrument that Kokoschka used resembles the one Loos holds in his hands. If Loos was still occupied doing his portrait, this would explain its lack of completion. But not everything in the picture underscores this suggestion: his look is not frontal and Loos’s eyes are quite obviously turned away. If he was looking into a mirror he should now be looking out of the picture at us. In this sense it is only an evocation of the idea of Loos’s making an auto-portrait and no simulation or imitation of it. But even for this, the painter needed to feel strongly sympathetic about his model (as we know he did)39. On a more universal than personal
note, the drawing shows the family-resemblance of an architect’s and a painter’s activity.
38. In this sense, the drawing looks more like a draft – where such omissions are common – than a completed work (cf. for this distinction: Martin SCHOLZ, “Kommunikationsdesign”, in Klaus SACHS-HOMBACH (ed.), Bildwissenschaft.
Disziplinen, Themen, Methoden, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2005, 337-338).
39. Rosa Berland underlines how important Loos was for Kokoschka (cf. “The Early Portraits of Oskar Kokoschka: A Narrative of Inner Life”).
I believe that the case at hand is one in which fusion plays an important part, not only in the sense of an identification of the painter with the subject he depicts, but also in a more technical sense. Monroe Beardsley uses this expression whenever the design of a representation and what it represents share a quality. The concept is vague but nonetheless useful40. In the drawing of Loos,
precision is a shared quality: Loos’s precision as a thinker or an architect is being represented by a precise drawing, one with lines precisely drawn, each of which precisely denotes some visual quality of the subject matter. A sober drawing here represents the most fervent enemy of ornament, Adolf Loos. This comparison shows something about Kokoschka’s style or manner: he adapts it to his model. If you compare his paintings and drawings with those by Egon Schiele, someone he is often associated with, this will become even clearer41. A distinction that art history and aesthetics
lack is the one between signature styles and subject specific ones. Currently, the main concepts of
40. Cf. Monroe BEARDSLEY, Aesthetics. Problems in the philosophy of criticism, New York, Harcourt, Brace &
Company, 1958, 293-305 and the discussion of Beardsley’s examples by George Dickie with an answer by Beardsley in The Journal of Philosophy (Vol. 52, No. 9, 1961). It seems to me that my use of the concept of fusion is in accordance with the use Beardsley makes of it in the examples which Dickie accepts. It might however seem that the occurrence of fusion is completely dependant on description. Couldn’t we always find a description of subject matter and of design such that fusion occurs (or does not occur)?
41. I do not imply that Schiele is a less talented painter than Kokoschka. That is probably not the case. But in Schiele’s paintings it is usually the personal style of the painter that primes. You always also see “a Schiele” while you see this or that person. The artist specific style elements are at least as important as the subject specific ones. In many of Kokoschka’s works, the opposite is the case.
Fig.3: Oskar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, published in Der Sturm, No. 18, June 30, 1910.
style are only personal (signature style), temporal (the style of a movement like impressionism), or geographical (the Flemish or the Italian Renaissance style). While attributions and personal genius does not play the role they used to play in art history any more, the adaptations that personal style undergoes when a painter chooses to represent a specific subject still often go unnoticed. The change of style which Kokoschka displays here is completely different from what we see at work when a painter’s style changes over time. This is Kokoschka in 1910, not Picasso in his période
bleue (c. 1901-1904) and his période rose (c. 1904-1906). We are dealing here with what could be
called “subject specific style” or shortly “subject style” rather than “signature style” – and there is something very modest about it. Each of Kokoschka’s drawings is still “a Kokoschka”, but by comparing them, we discover that they are also – and maybe more so – “a Loos”, “a Kraus” or “a Walden”. Apparently, Kraus was really onto something when he said that the paintings made the sitters recognizable: Kokoschka was willing to give up part of what made him distinguishable in order to match the subject he depicted.
5. Representing without intention ? How the meaning gets into the picture
Before we move on, I would like to underline that we do not need to postulate a conscious intention on the part of the artist to either vary his style or make different picture elements represent a specific aspect for a subject’s personality, in order to explain the phenomenon. Neither do we need the metaphysical talk about artists “painting souls”. The first reason for this is of a more general kind, the second is more specific. Generally speaking, I tend to agree with Paul Valéry when he says: “If I made Pierre’s portrait and someone finds that my work resembles Jacques more than Pierre, I cannot oppose them anything – their affirmation is just as good as mine. My intention is just my intention and the work is the work.”42
In his article “On the creation of art”, Monroe C. Beardsley takes up Valéry’s view of artistic creation, which opposes “the Finalist or goal-directed theory of art creation”43 to a view of creation
as “qualitative problem-solving”44.
As the poet moves from stage to stage, it is not that he is looking to see whether he is saying what he already meant, but that he is looking to see whether he wants to mean what he is saying. Thus, according to Valéry, “Every true poet is necessarily a fist rate critic” – not necessarily of others’ work, but of his own.45
42. “Si j’ai fait le portrait de Pierre, et si quelqu’un trouve que mon ouvrage ressemble à Jacques plus qu’à Pierre, je ne puis rien lui opposer – et son affirmation vaut la mienne. Mon intention n’est que mon intention et l’œuvre est l’œuvre.” (Paul VALÉRY, Tel quel, Paris, Gallimard, 2001, 146).
43. Monroe C. BEARDSLEY, “The Creation of Art”, in Journal of Aesthetics and Art-Criticism, Vol. 23, No. 3, 1965, 295.
44. Ibidem. 45. Ibid., 299.
This would allow for an artist to show something through pictorial means which he didn’t consciously master in the first place, but approves of once he discovers it in his own work.
As for the way the signifiers get into the painting in the first place, I think that empathy or a sort of osmosis that commonly happens between people can easily account for it46. If we are with
someone who is nervous, it sometimes makes us nervous ourselves, whereas a calm person may make us calm. If we are with someone whose state changes quickly, as frequently happens when we meet someone, we may be nervous at one point and calm at another. If we are drawing while we are with the person, it may seem likely that these different aspects would then be manifest in (different parts) of our drawing.
Anton Ehrenzweig uses concepts from psychoanalysis to explain how artists achieve distortions that can be “right or wrong”47 and thinks that artists and children achieve a deeper
likeness by using their “syncretistic vision” rather than “ordinary analytic perception”48. While the
adult viewer has learned to conceptualize and take apart his perceptions, the child and the gifted artist, Ehrenzweig suggests, sees all at once, en bloc not en détail, so to speak and may thereby achieve a deeper understanding of the nature of things seen.
6. The two sides of Karl Kraus : what Kokoschka reveals
Now that we know how specific Kokoschka’s variations of style can be, we can turn back to Kokoschka’s drawing of Karl Kraus to understand what the differences mean. As opposed to “the Loos”, it displays a certain nervousness that might well reflect the nervousness of the sitter, which would make it a case of fusion. We already noticed that Karl Kraus appears as poorly shaved. We even see the hairs upon his chest. And, as Kraus is known to have been a particularly dapper gentleman, those two elements are very surprising. I believe that they incorrectly depict facts about Kraus’s personal appearance, but correctly represent something else. They are attributes of Karl Kraus, the dangerous and belligerent satirist. If we understand the items in question in this way, Kraus’s tender look and the inclination of his head are as much opposed to his shaving as they are to his gesticulation. I believe that in this drawing, Kokoschka really tried to treat Kraus’s eyes as though they were “a window to his soul”. They reveal a quite different person than the public
persona which most of his contemporaries got to see. They confront us with a sensitive and
vulnerable man: not the ever-destructive satirist, but the friend who appreciates Peter Altenberg’s
46. For a development of this position cf. Ernst. H. GOMBRICH, “The Mask and the face”.
47. cf. Anton EHRENZWEIG, The Hidden Order of Art, 10.
perceptive and sensitive writing and buys him a steak when he is once again broke. A text that Kraus chose for a publication of Altenberg’s writings may well illustrate the sensitive side of Karl Kraus:
She was a cashier in a small café.
She had but one passion, or rather: one desire --- luxurious cigarettes. I offered them to her.
One day I kissed her, I caressed her tenderly. She did not prevent it.
She then spoke: “Too bad. Now, I will not appreciate those cigarettes as I used to do. Until now, they were all for free.”49
Some sentences from one of the uncounted letters and telegrams which Kraus sent from Vienna to Janowitz, the place where his love Sidonie von Nadherny lived, may be enough to show that Kraus did not here appreciate something he himself was completely deprived of:
Today: Not a word from Janowitz. As we had decided.
But if Janowitz could also be Vienna and to know what this might look like – ! I then can not do anything but read old letters – even if you do not like me to do so.
And I find one: “Vienna, Hotel Krantz, Thursday 22/1 at 10.55”
Never since then, never again such an echo to my passion! “You, almost a shiver overcomes my heart”
Is this still true? Does this contract still hold? I die for a yes and for a no. I know I do. But a forced intrusion into the sky like tonight had to be followed by a dive into hell.50
The Karl Kraus speaking here is one of those we can see in Kokoschka’s drawing. It is in this sense that the drawing allows for a profound recognition of Kraus’s personality.
In drawing Kraus as poorly shaved and badly dressed, Kokoschka depicts physical roughness to represent its spiritual equivalent, i.e. he “produces resemblance […] through non-resembling means”51. In giving Kraus sad and absent eyes, Kokoschka shows Kraus as a sensitive
and vulnerable person. His portrait is that of a man with a complex personality, and not merely a drawing of a man who is already an icon while still alive. In this sense, Kokoschka’s drawing goes quite against the image that Kraus wants to convey of himself. That this does not keep him from admitting what he calls “Kokoschka’s disfiguring genius” shows Kraus’s sovereignty52. Kokoschka
49. Peter ALTENBERG, Auswahl aus seinen Büchern von Karl Kraus, Frankfurt, Insel Verlag, 1997, 322.
50. Karl KRAUS, Briefe an Sidonie Nadherny von Borutin 1913-1936, I, München, Kösel, 1974, 26.
51. Gilles DELEUZE, Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, Paris, Minuit, 1981, 63. Quite surprisingly this formula
that Deleuze uses to talk about Bacon seems like a paraphrase of Karl Kraus’s second aphorism quoted above. 52. Cf. F 374, 1913, 31-33 quoted below. As the different quotations suggest, Kraus might have had to wrestle with
Kokoschka’s drawings. But in the end these statements are clearly positive. Kraus later changes his opinion about Kokoschka. In 1916, he even attacks him explicitly for not being able to unmask any more (cf. F 423, 1916, 16). He does not attack Kokoschka much further publicly. But letters show his irritation about Kokoschka’s paintings of warlords and his use of World War I for personal publicity reasons (cf. Leo A LENSING, Gesichter, 146-147).
here makes use of the representational range of his medium, showing that a draftsman can express in one image different aspects of a personality that are never simultaneously visible in a person, so to speak, in person. He can intuitively discover aspects of a person’s personality that the model carefully hides from public scrutiny and reach for visual signs that encode his intuitive findings.
Those visible transcriptions can be figurative in themselves, they can depict a fact, fictional or real (the fact that Kraus displays his hairy chest), but it is important to note that they do not have to depict anything specific in order to represent something (the strokes beside Kraus’s head). All this makes this drawing a brilliant case where “the physical is engendered by the representation of the psychological.”53 I can only agree with Berland to say that “Kokoschka was not interested in
taking part in biographical fiction making for others [;] in his paintings modes of power and privilege were no longer part of the metaphorical language of portraiture.” He did not show Karl Kraus as he wanted to be seen, but as Kokoschka himself saw him. Kokoschka is not willing to become an agent in, what we could now call, a public persona’s marketing machine, creating an aesthetically pleasing version of the photographs he likes to see of himself. However, the analysis in part 4 does not confirm Berland’s idea that “the status of the subjects seems almost incidental; they have become players in the drama of the artist’s life and his vision.”54 While Kokoschka’s signature
style is relatively strong in his paintings, it is not so strong in his drawings. Kokoschka seems to be more interested in finding an appropriate style for his subject than in self-expression. Kokoschka’s drawings are not as much about Kokoschka as they are about the people he draws.
7. The power of drawing and the limits of photography
The affirmation of painting’s superiority over photography is quite frequent, especially in Expressionism, but precise reasons are rarely given55. Now here is one: one main inconvenient of
standard portrait-photography seems to be that it cannot show diverging character-traits if a person never visibly expresses them at a precise moment56. It is of course possible to elicit certain reactions
from a sitter, even if the model opposes it, thus Yusuf Karsh is supposed to have provoked Winston Churchill in order to get that very determined look for his 1941 photograph, but this just shows that Churchill’s determination could become manifest. Character traits that are consistently hidden from surface manifestation are not accessible to photography at all – at least not in any sensibly direct
53. Rosa BERLAND, “The Early Portraits of Oskar Kokoschka: A Narrative of Inner Life”.
54. Ibidem.
55. Cf. Kasimir EDSCHMID, “Über den dichterischen Expressionismus”.
56. “Standard photography” means photography which does not endanger the trace content of a photography, through an intentional interruption of the causal chain reaching from the subject to the final photograph. It might be that long opening times or the superimposing of pictures can be used to compensate for some of the limitations of photography without endangering trace content. Using the parerga of the portrait, the accessories, the staging, can also be a way to try and show the invisible.
way. If people are sensitive but their sensitivity never appears on their face, for example because they have achieved a high level of self-control, no photo will ever show this part of their personality57. A drawing or a painting, on the other hand, can do so. This is because drawings, like
written texts, represent their subjects as testimonies and not as traces58. As Gregory Currie explains,
“testimonies differ from traces […] in […] their primary representational range: we can draw and write about things that never happened or have not happened yet, but only real things can leave traces of themselves, and a trace can only be of something in the past and never of anything in the future”59.
There is a second element that seems linked to the idea of greater representational range: in a drawing, the artist can, for example, combine the depiction of a hand at rest with that of an arm that is moving. If this is well done, it enhances representation. In Kokoschka’s drawing, Kraus’s facial expression shows one quality while his body language communicates another. In order to achieve a high-level synthesis, Kokoschka uses low-level analysis: in order to give a clear image of the mind he takes the body apart.
The analysis of Kokoschka’s drawings allowed us to enrich Currie’s idea of representational range. It shows that drawing’s greater representational range can not only be used to show fictional beings, to draw an image of a brighter future or help us imagine a building that has not been built yet, but also to achieve a more adequate and complex vision of reality. As it appears, the difference in production of a photographic picture and of a drawing lead to pictures which differ in what they can (easily) show60.
57. Maybe they only ever express it in the words they say, or in their artistic creations.
58. Even though a drawing is of course a trace of its process of creation. But this is not necessarily part of its primary content. It is important to note that there is a fundamental difference between drawing and photography here: the drawing of Kraus by Kokoschka is a trace of certain tools the painter used and of the way he moved his hands across the paper. But this is not what the drawing depicts or represents. A photography, on the other hand, depicts exactly what it is a trace of. If the picture looks like the picture of a zebra, but it has been taken by placing a painted horse in front of the camera, it still depicts a horse. The fact that Rembrandt used his lover in order to paint the biblical Susan, on the other hand, does not impede the painting from being a painting of biblical Susan.
59. Gregory CURRIE, “Documentary”, in Arts and Minds, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, 67.
60. This is not to say that photography is not an artform, that intentions do not play any role in realizing photographs or that less skill is required to produce a great photograph than to produce a great drawing. But when all has been done and said, a photographic picture depends on what was in front of the camera at the moment the picture was taken. There is nothing equivalent in drawing. The fact that we actually recognize Karl Kraus in Kokoschka’s drawing (in one way or another) has social, cultural, psychological, intentional reasons. Kokoschka was expected to do Kraus’s drawing, he was hoping to become famous, he was interested in capturing Kraus’s personality, etc. We have been told that the picture shows Karl Kraus, we have seen photographs and recognize a certain likeness. None of these elements, which link Kraus to Kokoschka to the drawing to us are causal. As much as we know about the causal constraints Kokoschka was under, he might just as well have produced a drawing showing a pink elephant instead of Kraus. The drawing would then have been rejected, and had we gotten to see it, we would probably have found it hard to recognize the writer in the drawing. Now think of how different things are for the photographer setting up her camera in front of Kraus on that same night. She could not have produced the picture of a pink elephant. And had some early Dadaist placed a pink elephant instead of the writer in Karl Kraus’s office that evening, the painter,
Given the observation that photography has a more limited representational range, which Karl Kraus had certainly grasped, it is not surprising to read that he didn’t believe a good portrait could be achieved based on a photograph: “The good portraitist uses his model as the bad one uses a photograph of the model. You always need a little help.”61
Karl Kraus believes that the good portraitist needs to paint his model directly. The bad one uses a photograph. We can connect this aphorism with the one about resemblance published in the same edition of Die Fackel. If we assume that our interpretation of the first aphorism is correct and if we take into account Kraus’s generalization of his statements about Kokoschka62 by reading “The
good portraitist” as meaning “Every good portraitist”, we can make the following argument: P1. Every good portraitist paints his model directly and does not use a photograph P2. One is a good portraitist if he shows the profound character of his model
C. Whoever shows the profound character of his model – the good portraitist – paints his model directly and does not use a photograph
This seems to imply a more general rule for painters: if you want to show someone’s profound character, you have to paint the person d’après nature. Kokoschka is famous for painting people not only in their presence, but, as I have already noted, while they talk and move. The photography-aphorism might well stem from Kraus’s acquaintance with Kokoschka’s practice. But more generally speaking, it seems that Kraus states here the superiority of painting as opposed to photography. We explained why this point can indeed seem convincing. This aphorism strongly calls into question the idea that Kraus opposes the expressionist rejection of photography by using photographs for his satire63. Kraus indeed shared the conviction that photography – as opposed to
drawing – cannot show the complex personality of a person, making her recognizable in a deeper sense. But if Kraus does not believe that portrait photography has any artistic interest, this does not imply that photography is useless for other purposes. Kraus’s conscious use and conceptualisation of photography is illustrated by his response to a mention in Zeit im Bild where a listing amongst the “Famous or interesting contemporaries” owes him a caricature. Kraus’s reply seems to show his intuitive understanding of the strong connexion between Expressionism’s revealing distortions and caricature drawing64.
but not the photographer could still have produced a picture of Kraus. 61. F 300, 25 and Pro Domo et Mundo, 254.
62. In the second publication of the second aphorism I quote, Kraus replaces OK by He. I believe we can read this He as a variable.
63. Cf. Léo A. LENSING, Gesichter, 143.
64. Starting out from ideas by Werner Hofmann and Ernst H. Gombrich, I explore if there is indeed a deep connection between caricature and expressionist portrait in Klaus SPEIDEL, “Portrait expressionniste et caricature. Le rôle
réaliste de la distorsion”, in Ridiculosa, No. 14, “Caricature et modernité”, 2008. [On line]: http://www.eiris.eu/eiris/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=305&Itemid=125#_ftn51.
In Zeit im Bild, the caricaturist Blix published a portrait of Kraus that he affirms to have drawn in one of Kraus’s public lectures in Munich. Kraus’s satirical reply quite tellingly ends with a photograph (Fig. 4). The satirist explains in detail why the caricature cannot represent him and why the publication of the photograph is justified:
Mr Blix’s singularity of seeing a cucumber in the middle of every face and a handle on its sides does not seem to correspond with my own physical deformities. But as I do not use a pince-nez and there was no chandelier standing on the table, I must believe that the master did not see me at all and that he therefore made my portrait based on deficient information or rumours, maybe based on a confusion of my person with another. My vanity, which does not concern my body, would fondly recognize myself in a freak if it could discover the draftsman’s spirit in it, and I am proud of Kokoschka’s testimonial because the truth of deforming genius stands higher than anatomy and because reality is nothing but an optical illusion in the face of art. But the right one has over one’s own body should stand higher than the mediocrity that captures nothing […] and it should at least be allowed to correct by photographical amendment an illustration that invents instead of exaggerating and that it is
Fig.4: Caricature: Blix / Photograph: Madame d’Ora, published in Die Fackel 372, 1913, May 5.
nothing else than the propagation of wrong information about my ears. Why should the drawn report have the right to lie while the written report does not? A small nose may become a button, a big nose a trumpet, such is the right of the profession. But the master who writes the name of the man with the small nose under the drawing of the trumpet, can be called a liar. Should the protection against verbal forgery really fail when it is confronted with this more stabbing method?65
Even if this text is longer and not as conceptually dense as the aphorisms, there are several dichotomies and concepts that merit our attention. First of all, Kraus defends the idea of implicit laws of the genre of caricature that allow “exaggeration” but forbid “invention”. He then suggests that positive laws be made by the State in order to regulate visual lies just as there are laws regulating written lies. If we accept with Gregory Currie that drawings are, just like verbal texts, “testimonies”, this claim makes perfect sense. In fact, it makes it conceivable that a published drawing that deforms or invents a person’s appearance becomes a defamation. However, the highest standard for Kraus are not the laws of the genre, but the genius of the draftsman. Kokoschka deforms, but “the truth of deforming genius” is more important than anatomy. In other words: not all distortions are equal. Anton Ehrenzweig seems to agree: “There are degrees of success and failure even in the invention of the freest and most phantastic equivalent. […] We can judge Picasso’s phantasmagorias or the wild colour distortions of the Fauve’s right or wrong, though we have not any rational standard for judging them.”66 As opposed to Ehrenzweig, Kraus seems to have
a rational standard: amplification is allowed, invention is to be blamed – unless, of course, a genius like Kokoschka invents. For Lensing, the fact that Kraus publishes a photograph of himself at the end of this article is but another sign of Kraus’s ambivalent relationship with the Kokoschka portraits (even though Kraus explicitly refers to Kokoschka in order to underline the fact that pictorial distortion is not in and by itself something he rejects67). As we saw, it is only when you fail
65. “Die Eigenart des Herrn Blix, in der Mitte jedes Gesichtes eine Gurke und am Rand einen Henkel zu sehen scheint sich auch nicht mit meinen Geburtsfehlern zu decken. Da ich aber auch keinen Zwicker trage und kein Kandelaber neben mir stand, so vermute ich, daß der Meister mich überhaupt nicht gesehen, sondern auf Grund falscher Informationen und Gerüchte oder vermöge einer Personenverwechslung porträtiert hat. Meine Eitelkeit, die sich nicht auf meinen Leib bezieht, würde sich gern in einer Mißgeburt erkennen, wenn sie in ihr den Geist des Zeichners erkennte, und ich bin stolz auf das Zeugnis eines Kokoschka, weil die Wahrheit des entstellenden Genies über der Anatomie steht und weil vor der Kunst die Wirklichkeit nur eine optische Täuschung ist. Gegen die Mittelmäßigkeit, die nicht trifft, und vor der Mittelmäßigkeit, die es anschaut, müßte das Recht am eigenen Körper statuiert werden, mindestens aber gelte die Befugnis, eine Illustration, die nicht übertreibt, sondern erfindet und nichts weiter bedeutet als die Verbreitung einer falschen Nachricht über meine Ohren, durch die photographische Entgegnung des Sachverhalts zu berichtigen. Warum soll die zeichnerische Reportage das Recht auf die Lüge voraus haben? Eine kleine Nase darf zum Knopf, eine große zum Rüssel werden: das wird dem Handwerk zugestanden. Aber wenn der Meister unter dem Rüssel den Namen dessen setzt, der die kleine Nase hat, so läuft er Gefahr, ein Lügner genannt zu werden. Warum soll der Schutz, der gegen die verbale Fälschung aufgerichtet ist, der eindringlicheren Methode gegenüber versagen ?” (F 372, 1913, 31-33 (the italics are mine.))
66. Anton EHRENZWEIG, The Hidden Order of Art, 10.
artistically, when your distortions “capture nothing”, as Kraus says, when they do not yield a deeper resemblance, that you owe fidelity – or truth – of depiction. A bad photograph offers at least optical fidelity. Far from showing that Kraus does generally prefer his photographical depiction, the decision to counter Blix’s drawing with a photograph is to be understood as the final humiliation of a poor draftsman unaware of the rules of his profession and lacking the genius that would enable him to productively transgress them68. Standard photographic realism is still better than unrealistic
distortion or, even worse, invention.
* * *
A close analysis of both Kraus’s aphorisms and Kokoschka’s drawings showed the subtlety with which both the young painter and the seasoned writer used their respective media at the time. Our close-readings have allowed us to better understand a distinction that cuts right across different visual and verbal media, and which can be called their “representational range”. The fact that the content of a drawing depends on the intentions of the maker, and – we should add – on what it looks like and not on what it is a trace of, is responsible for this range. A draftsman can therefore (1) include visible equivalents of invisible character-traits, either by (a) adding aspects to a person’s depiction (e.g. an open shirt showing chest-hair for a dapper gentleman) or by (b) distorting the appearance, in the sense of moving away from a strictly optical depiction (e.g. drawing unnaturally bent fingers). These variations are relatively easy to achieve in drawing, but would require harsh interventions in photography, interventions that endanger the status of the photograph as such. If these variations of purely optical appearance allow to recognize aspects of a personality, we can speak of “realistic distortions”.
Furthermore a gifted draftsman can (2) show the different sides of a complex personality, because he is able to combine the visible expressions of states of mind or emotions that never simultaneously appear in the person (e.g. a contemplative, sensitive look can be combined with hands violently moving). Karl Kraus draws an essential difference between successful (and thus legitimate) distortions and unsuccessful (and thus illegitimate) ones. Photography is to be preferred to the former, but not to the latter.
Generally speaking, it can be said that long opening times or superimposing pictures make
combination (2) and maybe distortion (1b) possible in standard photography, but there does not
68. For a more detailed discussion of the issue of caricature see Klaus SPEIDEL, “Portrait expressionniste et caricature.
seem to be any way in which photography can match the power of (1) addition without becoming a testimony in its technical sense.
Another important outcome of our analysis is that the traditional concepts of style cannot account for a phenomenon which we have dubbed “subject specific style”: the variation of style that a painter uses to better account for the subject he depicts. While our example was portraiture, this point can be generalized to any subject, and to larger chunks of work. In this sense, the choice of the “muted” style by Art Spiegelman for his Maus. A Survivor’s Tale69 is a case of subject specific
style70.
Klaus Speidel (klausspeidel@gmail.com) is preparing a Ph.D. at Sorbonne University (Paris 4) where he also teaches philosophy. Applying reader-response theory, his thesis opposes narratologists such as Seymour Chatman and Gérard Genette to defend that a single still picture can tell a story. In earlier publications Klaus Speidel maintained that caricature originated in Flemish (as opposed to Italian) art, analyzed the anthological and anti-narrative aspects of Andy Warhol’s paintings and compared micro-readings of pictures and texts. He regularly writes about contemporary art.
69. Cf. Art SPIEGELMAN, Maus. A Survivor’s Tale, New York, Pantheon Books, 1996.
70. Cf. Mireille RIBIÈRE, “Maus. A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman: a second-hand narrative in comic-book form”, in
Jan BAETENS & Mireille RIBIÈRE (eds.), Time, Narrative and the Fixed Image/Temps, Récit et Image Fixe,
Amsterdam & Atlanta, Rodopi, 2001, 132-135, and also Martin SCHÜWER, Wie Comics erzählen. Grundriss einer
intermedialen Erzähltheorie der grafischen Literatur, Trier, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2008, 368-373 and Scott MCCLOUD, Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art, New York, Harper, 1994, 181. As it has often been noted,
Spiegelman’s style was much more sophisticated in his earlier comics. It has sometimes been suggested that his style evokes the style of drawings made by primitive means quite like those of the inmates in concentration camps.
