Art: O.K.'s O.K.

Expressionism is not so much a school of art as of attitude: it requires the artist, while sober, to behave as if drunk. The damn-the-torpedoes dean of the school is Oskar Kokoschka, 69, who signs himself "O.K." and is proving very much O.K. in Salzburg this season. Kokoschka's sets for a festival performance of Mozart's Magic Flute were the hit of the show (TIME, Aug. 8), his summer art school in a fortress overlooking the city was going strong, and an exhibition of his last three years' work drew raves from the critics.

Kokoschka himself led the applause. Struggling to describe his most ambitious new work—a triptych he calls Thermopylae—Kokoschka allowed that "it embodies all the richness of painting art, all the invention of painters, and all the knowledge of painting of the past." In the center panel of the triptych (see cut) a Greek warrior, representing Europe torn between East and West, stands hesitant. To his right, in an ascending crescent, are a traitor, a seer, and a standoffish sort of god. To his left, the battle rages, a lost one, because "battles are always lost."

The son of a poor Czech goldsmith, Kokoschka once made a living decorating fans. He has spent the major part of his life in opposition to the painstaking and delicacy required for goldsmithing and fan-painting; to him emotion is all. Kokoschka early learned to squint at the world through thick, hot lenses of feeling and to say what he saw in fat, turbulent strokes of brilliant color. Hitler called him the most degenerate painter; the free world found him an apostle of artistic freedom. No modern artist except Picasso (whom he affects to despise) has staged more lavishly dramatic impromptus on canvas. Kokoschka's "O.K." is almost a synonym for expressionism, and rightly so.

Kokoschka still stands proud and defiant against what he calls "the mob," but more gloomily than before. "In an age when every boy understands the airplane," he complains, "there's no need for art. People today can live quite happily without art, so long as they have mathematics."