Letter from Oskar Kokoschka to J.P. Hodin

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[Translation/transcription]

Villeneuve

12 May 1958

Dear Master,

I'm curious about the colour reproduction of the Eindhoven image in Magnum and what my dear Hodinus will write about it. Please go back to Vienna to take a look at the exhibition. In our 'non-objective' epoch, particularly now you've got the 'action painters' from the USA along with the other chimpanzee shows at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, this is the last exhibition imbued with the western spirit. Perhaps this means that Europe's mission, at least in the artistic sense, is 'complete', i.e. finished. No new life will grow from technical civilisation, that much is clear.

'Die Macht der Musik' [The Power of Music] and 'Kraft und Schwäche' [Strength and Weakness] are both my own titles. 'Kraft und Schwäche' relates to the colours yellow, red, orange (hot) and blue (cold, debilitating, feminine).

'Macht der Musik' is derived from the subject: the trumpet blast shocks the image with a flash of yellow which, in a terrific mass of luminous colour (it glows like a stained-glass window, something Rouault never achieved, while Van Gogh is dull and whitish-green by comparison), starts to tremble like a living organism set in motion. This is 'action painting' in the true sense, and besides Grünewald (Colmar), Dürer's Apostles in Munich and Titian's Pietà in the Accademia in Venice there can hardly be a comparable example in the history of art. But this image also stands at the end of a long line of Dresden experiments with colour, cold and warmth. You should see it in the original. I had the opportunity recently, after some thirty years, and I was speechless. I'd just been studying a huge Van Gogh exhibition in New York, which was still fresh in my memory. It really was the power of the music of colour. Such Russian philosophasters and romantic babblers as Kandinsky could only ever dream of such power; they never made anything more of it than a test-tube homunculus, which is also good enough for the abstract sputniks!

I'm looking forward to seeing you and Pam.

In love,

Yours,

O Kokoschka

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