The Neue Galerie has organized “Focus: Oskar Kokoschka,” a nice, small exhibition of works by this Viennese Expressionist.
In the earliest and most compelling works, Kokoschka (1886-1980) painted the faces of his sitters with small, wiggly strokes and in sickly colors so they look as if they’d had their skin peeled off. With their bony, veiny, weirdly gesturing hands, they resemble extras from a remake of “Night of the Living Dead.” The gaunt, hollow-eyed “Martha Hirsch (Dreaming Woman)” projects an eerie, erotic charm, while her male counterparts look like Frankensteinian madmen.
With such pictures, Kokoschka made a place for himself near the start of a long tradition of moralizing portraiture — from Ensor to Ivan Albright to Peter Saul — in which grotesque distortion stands for sickness of the soul.
