Jack B. Yeats & Oskar Kokoschka
Compton Verney, until 14 December
In 1962 Oskar Kokoschka drew record crowds to his Tate retrospective — belated recognition for the Austrian-born artist who had lived in London, on and off, since 1938. Herbert Read blamed the long delay on Kokoschka’s ‘un-Englishness’, so it’s ironic that his latest comeback should be at that most English of galleries, Compton Verney, in a double bill with another un-English artist still awaiting due recognition in this country: the Irish painter Jack Butler Yeats.
Oskar Kokoschka: Exile and New Home 1938–1980 comes to Compton Verney from the Albertina, Vienna; Jack B. Yeats, Masquerade and Spectacle: The Circus and the Travelling Fair from the National Gallery of Ireland. The two artists knew and admired each other. Both loved juicy paint and rampant colour; both were dramatists who also wrote plays, and humanists who also happened to excel at painting horses.
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