Dashing pair

Laura Gascoigne

Wednesday, 22nd October 2008

Jack B. Yeats & Oskar Kokoschka
Compton Verney, until 14 December

The tent flap is the magic mirror of Yeats’s world, between the razzle-dazzle exoticism of the ring and the humdrum reality of Irish rural life. In ‘This Grand Conversation was under the Rose’ (1943) we look in on the brightness of the ring from the dark outside, where a melancholy clown and moody haute école rider commune in silence; in ‘Alone’ (1944) we look the other way, out past the solitary clown wrapped in his thoughts towards an animated triangle of daylight. We’re never quite in the fantasy, and never quite out. In earlier works, a shadowy figure often acts as a reminder of reality, like the drunk curled up asleep under ‘Fortune and her Wheel’ (1902) or the bored ticket seller squatting dully by his stripy booth as the ‘Double Jockey Act’ (1916) thunders past, missing him by a whisker. Political tensions are left to simmer beneath the surface.

With Kokoschka, on the other hand, they boil over. A lithograph of 1956, ‘The Child of Bethlehem’, drops a Madonna and Child into the middle of a Hungarian street fight. The 1940 painting ‘The Red Egg’, showing a Humpty Dumpty-headed Mussolini and a dunce-hatted Hitler trying to carve an escaping Czechoslovakian chicken while a British lion licks his chops and a fat French tabby cat waits for scraps under the table is a political cartoon dressed up in oil paint.

A display of 40 works can only give a taste of Kokoschka’s omnivorous appetite for subjects. There are oil landscapes of ‘Prague’ (1938), ‘Polperro’ (1939), ‘Tower Bridge’ (1963) and the ‘Matterhorn’ (1947), a couple of pre-war pastoral idylls and a mid-Sixties still life. There are late portrait drawings and prints (though sadly no paintings), crayon sketches of animals and the circus, lithographs of King Lear and Odysseus — with whom the wandering artist strongly identified — and one grand allegorical canvas of ‘Amor und Psyche’ (c.1955), hard to take seriously with its overweight, droopy-winged Cupid. What unifies the vision is an eye for drama that lands us right in the lap of the woman ‘In the Garden’ (1934) and all but tramples us under the hooves of the rearing Pegasus in a lithograph of 1966. If the horse doesn’t do vertical take-offs, we’re finished.

It’s all a bit overwhelming and, well, un-English. Standing in front of ‘Matterhorn I’ (1947) I understood the complaint of one 1962 critic that ‘some landscapes look like nothing on earth — save perhaps a Fair Isle pullover run up by a tipsy knitter’, though here the knitter was on LSD. In the company of Yeats, Kokoschka comes across as bombastic, like a trombone in a duet with a tin whistle. To contemporary audiences the Irish painter’s shambling Odyssey on a circus wagon may seem more mythic than the Austrian’s overblown Homeric one. Yeats was refreshingly unpretentious about art and myth — Botticelli painted Venus, in his opinion, ‘because she was such a damn fine girl’. On this point, anyway, Kokoschka would have agreed.