Letter from Oskar Kokoschka to J.P. Hodin

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[Translation/transcription]

Villa Delphin
Quartier Byron
Villeneuve
Vaud

27 January 1954

My dear Master Hodinus,

Many thanks for your kind new-year's letter. We too send you our very best wishes.

I'm very upset that the beautiful one doesn't want to come and see me. I would have liked to look at her when I lose patience with my three large wall paintings, which are already full of figures, depth, movement, life and world - things for which you can now be prosecuted and muzzled under the totalitarian regime of abstractism. At the hairdresser's today I saw four colour pages in Life magazine (I don't recall the issue): Japan Turns Abstract. Among other painters there was a buddist high priest in his vestments, standing in a ceremonial pose in his fantastic temple with - I could hardly believe my eyes - two 'abstract' pictures that he'd painted, one on either side, just the sort of thing they teach you to make at the Slade, in Texas or Montmartre. What a really ghastly thing, converting this high priest to the international style of a subspecies of mankind which, when properly drilled to work like a machine, reproduces itself by itself and thus at a stroke multiplies its number to infinity. Now I understand what the drummers were doing under Hitler and on the kolkhoz: they were there to stop anyone noticing the emptiness within. That said, the buddist drums in the picture were still of the best Japanese craftsmanship. But whenever man comes to stand outside the law, as in our time, he no longer has any business with the visual arts either; he has become an abstractum. Perhaps because they haven't yet found the missing link and have only recently been given the scent of another forgery? Disillusioned progressives!
If you have time, please return the two or three issues of Sele Arte that I once sent you. I see the December issue contains one of your articles, about contemporary English sculpture, with some funny images, though I can read the article only with difficulty because my Italian isn't as good as it used to be. If you happen to have a spare copy of the German and don't mind showing me, then please send that too.

How are you all and what are you up to? Will the beautyful one be willing to come to me later? At the beginning of March we'll be in the country in England, for a week perhaps. I'll need a break once I've finished composing and underpainting the three panels for Hamburg University (18 sqm). After that I'll need to do four or five months of uninterrupted work, right up to the summer, which leaves us no time to travel anywhere.

With best regards once again,

Yours,

OK

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