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- Oskar Kokoschka 1886–1980
- Recipient
- Dr J. P. Hodin
- Title
- Note/letter from Oskar Kokoschka to J.P. Hodin regarding the publisher’s advertising of his book ‘Spur im Treibsand’
- Date
- [c.1957]
- Format
- Document - correspondence
- Collection
- Tate Archive
- Acquisition
- Accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax and allocated to Tate, 2006. Accrual presented by Annabel Hodin, 2020
- Reference
- TGA 20062/4/199/2/22
Description
[Translation/transcription]
Please recommend this to people so the publisher doesn't go bankrupt on my account.
OK
Neue Atlantis-Buecher
Oskar Kokoschka
Spur im Treibsand: Geschichten [A Sea Ringed with Visions]
260 pages, hardback, 14 francs
This volume is the first major collection of prose by an author, now in his seventieth year, who perceives the world in pictures, who feels and invokes it with his eyes. That much would be evident to a reader who had never heard Kokoschka's name, but those who revere him as one of the most important painters of the twentieth century will find not one prejudice confirmed in this other medium of language. Instead they will gain a new and immediate experience of what the artist has to offer with the brush as with the pen, a spectacle of singular luminosity that holds us completely transfixed.
These pictures from memory, figures and tableaus from the turbulent postwar years in Berlin, when Kokoschka belonged to the circle of the leading expressionist journal Der Sturm; romantic tales from his travels in Cyprus and Africa; episodes from the east front in the First World War; human fates and ideas that traverse space and time with the compelling temerity of flight dreams - all these contribute to a sharply delineated outline that closely follows what must for the most part be autobiographical traces. But at the same time this silhouette is hallucinatory; it gives the reader something more than just a condensed view to be taken in at a glance; it seizes hold of him and sweeps him up in a mighty groundswell of lyricism that carries everything along with it, filling him with its dark energy.
[verso in Kokoschka's hand:]
Please also ask the Israeli delegation for the address of Yapou-Hoffmann's wife, who now seems to be stationed in the USA, because a letter sent to her came back.
Frau Mahler asked me about the celebrations for her seventieth birthday. I replied that I didn't want to go round gathering dessicated accolades in a basket. Simple, spontaneous, heartfelt affirmation is far better.
She really ought to have someone take some photographs of the fans, but doesn't want to do this because it costs money?
Archive context
- Papers of Josef Paul Hodin TGA 20062 (407)
-
- Correspondence by sender TGA 20062/4 (275)
-
- Correspondence between Oskar Kokoschka and J.P. Hodin TGA 20062/4/199 (112)
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- Correspondence from Oskar Kokoschka to J.P. Hodin, 1950-9 TGA 20062/4/199/2 (31)