At a moment when all the discordant voices of modern society attempt to exorcize the vertigo of man with scientific clichés or prophetic curses I come to share with you reflections that are neither tragic nor, I hope, fatuous. They are simply the thoughts of one civilized man to another, dictated by a spirit of sobriety and concern, and with no pretensions to exorcize anything. The vertigo of the twentieth century needs no permission of yours or mine to continue. The tornado has not consulted any of us, and will not do so. This does not mean that we are helpless. It only means that our salvation lies in understanding our exact position, not in flattering ourselves that we have brought the whirlwind into being by ourselves, or that we can calm it with a wave of the hand.

It is certainly true that the storm of history has arisen out of our own hearts. It has sprung unbidden out of the emptiness of technological man. It is the genii he has summoned out of the depths of his own confusion, this complacent sorcerer’s apprentice who spends billions on weapons of destruction and space rockets when he cannot provide decent meals, shelter and clothing for two thirds of the human race. Is it improper to doubt the intelligence and sincerity of modern man? I know it is not accepted as a sign of progressive thinking to question the enlightenment of the twentieth century barbarian.

Kokoschka is one of the few great modem painters that the art-publishing trade has not preconditioned our minds to. The usual jading influence of a torrent of monographs so bamboozles the mind that, by the time one gets to the pictures, an assessment is the last thing the mind is capable of or inclined to do. The reason for his escape from this kind of attention is, I suspect, because Kokoschka has nothing in common with the art movement that nearly monopolizes our attention, the school of Paris; he is outside the tradition of Paris, owing nothing to the discoveries of the early years of this century there. His unique personality is so secure in its own conviction that far from being in need of lateral help from a ‘school’ he defies any categorization at all. He cuts across any attempt to label him. The question of style which is so central to any evaluation of modem art is brushed aside with protean energy, and it is this unexpected impatience that is the most disturbing and individual quality of the retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery.

However extreme and exuberant the artists of the school of Paris were, they possessed that precise instinct for balance and interval in drawing and painting, that instinct for measure that enables even their more unconsidered pictures to retain an authority because of it. Kokoschka’s balance in drawing and painting is imprecise; not only the more obvious lack of it in the paintings but the subtle lack of it in the drawings, gnaws away at our confidence, however attracted we are by the verve and vitality which almost persuade us that the qualities we miss are not central to the problem of all art. In Kokoschka’s painting the intuition seems to have been given full scope and a decisive divorce from any idea of intellectual clarity. One might think here is the ultimate ideal of what the romantic artist aspires to be—always protean, verging on the inchoate, with more than a dash of madness.