Kokoschka is one of the few Austrian artists in this century - writers and musicians are of course another thing - who made their mark internationally (the sculptor Wotruba is another). Egon Schiele, Kokoschka's gifted contemporary and fellow-student, died too young and his fame was largely posthumous, while Klimt belongs to an older generation. It is yet another case of exile paying off ultimately in terms of fame and reputation, as in the case of Joyce, Beckett and so on. But Kokoschka also possessed the assets of a powerful personality, a buoyant vitality, a vigorous intelligence and a fair share of luck. Painterly talent apart, he was one of the great survivors. Born at Pochlarn on the Danube, he came from a poorly-off background - the family had once been wealthy goldsmiths, but the machine age passed them by and Kokoschka's father, who inherited the family trade, grew into a morose and defeated man barely eking out a living for his family. Kokoschka in his teens was rebellious, ambitious, unfocused, spiky and socially unsure, but with faith in his star.
At art school in Vienna, though he antagonised some conservative teachers, he quickly made his mark and was talked about even in his early 20s. He also made some influential friends, including the pioneer architect Adolf Loos, who helped him in his career, and from the first he fitted easily into Viennese cafe life. Kokoschka wrote a lot as well as painting and drawing compulsively, and some of his plays have kept a fringe place in the German and Austrian Expressionist theatre. However, the dominant experience of his 20s - perhaps even of his whole life - was his encounter and love affair with Alma Mahler, widow of the composer, then a beautiful, regal and still-young woman with a liking for the social round. The callow, unpolished young painter became her lover for a time, and she even became pregnant by him but preferred to undergo an abortion rather than bear his child and risk social disgrace.
It was a tempestuous relationship, embodied in the painting The Bride of the Wind, until Kokoschka predictably had to yield his place in her bed to another lover - Alma, a born grande amoureuse, had a steady succession of them. A little later, she married the architect Gropius, who had been her lover during her first marriage.
The first World War had by now broken out, so Kokoschka sought a harsh medicine for his misery by enlisting in the Austrian cavalry. He fought on the Russian front and in an ambush in a Polish forest was first shot in the head, then bayoneted in the lung as he lay prostrate (the Russian army usually gave its Cossacks the task of finishing off the wounded). Brought back to Vienna, he pulled through somehow and eventually went back to the war, before being shellshocked on the Italian front. This time he was discharged for good, and found a new artistic base in Dresden and new friends and lovers there.
He remained fixated on Alma, however, even commissioning a noted doll-maker in Munich to make him a life-size doll in her image. He kept this with him for several years - it appears in some of his pictures - until it was destroyed at a particularly drunken bohemian party.
A major signpost in his career was his contract with the art dealer Paul Cassirer, who paid him a large retainer which allowed him to lead a roving life, travel widely and paint as he chose. A meeting with Alma in Venice proved disillusioning; the once-gracious Viennese belle had aged a lot and put on weight, thanks to a steady intake of liqueurs and champagne. They parted on bad terms and did not come together again as friends until many years later. But his career was now launched internationally, with exhibitions as far afield as London. Meanwhile Austria, his homeland, was riven politically, and in the early 1930s the right-wing government of Dollfuss suppressed a left-wing rising in Vienna which was virtually a civil war.
Dollfuss was also coming under heavy pressure from the Nazis, both in Germany and at home, which was to culminate in his assassination by them a few years later - soon followed by Hitler's invasion of Austria and its absorption into the new German Reich. By then, however, Kokoschka was living in Prague, where he had gone for an exhibition of his work and ended up staying for four years.
After the 1938 Anschluss Czechoslovakia came under threat from Hitler in turn, and though Kokoschka was not Jewish, eventually he would have faced the treatment already handed out to his fellow Expressionists in Germany. In Prague he met a highly intelligent young woman lawyer, Olda Palkovsky, who was 30 years his junior but threw in her lot with him. Strong-minded and practical, she organised their escape to England, standing in day-long queues for air tickets and arranging for passports and visas.
In the end, they got out just in time and settled down to an insecure life in wartime London, where they were befriended by people such as the critic Herbert Read and Sir Kenneth Clark of the National Gallery. They were bombed out at least once in the Blitz and spent part of the war at Polperro, in Cornwall. By this stage they had married, in a London registry office housed temporarily in a bomb shelter.
Kokoschka went back to Vienna in 1946, mainly to see his surviving family, but he refused to live there again and eventually settled in Switzerland. He was now a world figure, a prestige survivor of the old Austria and of the heroic age of Modernism, and with his innate histrionic flair he played the role of an ageing prophet with much aplomb. His summer school in Salzburg became a drawing-point for artists of many ages and varied talent, he painted the portraits of international statesman including Adenauer and Golda Meir, he surrounded himself with female admirers, he aired his views on all topics including art - a field where his ideas became predictably reactionary.
His finest work, however, was behind him and arguably he never quite recaptured the power and intensity of the pictures he painted in the years just before the Great War. When he died in 1980, he was no longer a force in modern art. Susanne Keegan has written a competent, very readable life, but not an inspired or probing one. (She had previously produced a book on Alma Mahler, and I have a certain suspicion that this one is to some extent a spin-off). Her knowledge of Austrian culture and art is not close, she attempts little evaluation of the paintings themselves (some of the later ones, in my opinion, come quite close to kitsch) and she might also have gone into more detail about the wartime life of the many remarkable Austrian emigres in Britain - a fascinating chapter of cultural history, and one still relatively neglected.
FOR instance, the important painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky is only mentioned once, and briefly, though her mother's house in Hampstead was a regular meeting place for many of the leading emigres including the Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti (I met Olda there once in the years of her widowhood - a tall, gauntly handsome woman dressed in black). Neither is there any mention of the painter Georg Eisler, a leading protege of Kokoschka in wartime England who eventually took over his summer school in Salzburg, and whom I also knew well. (It was he, incidentally, who told me that the older painter always pronounced his name with the accent on the first syllable - Kok-oschka.)
Kokoschka is known to have come to Ireland on a number of occasions, but while Susanne Keegan mentions the first (in 19289) she ignores Jack Yeats, whom he called "the last European painter in the great tradition". There is, however, a picture of Kokoschka in Dublin in 1950, posing with Victor Waddington, whose gallery was such a centrepiece at the time. And finally, she scarcely attempts any real analysis in depth of Kokoschka's artistic psyche, the various traditions (including Austrian Baroque) which met rather uneasily in him, and his ultimate "place".
Neither does she probe the pronounced theatrical element in his personality - he was, in some respects, almost an actor man- que. Arguably, all that may be outside the scope of a straightforward, factual biography, but the man's admittedly eventful outer life has virtually swamped the complex inner one.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic