This self-portrait was commissioned by a friend of the artist. It was begun in Ostravice, a village in the Czech Republic where the grandparents of Olda Palkovská, Oskar Kokoschka’s future wife, lived. The landscape depicts the woods behind their house. Kokoschka started work on the painting in the late summer of 1937, and then put it aside following a kidney infection which necessitated a hospital stay. He finished it a little later, at a friend’s house.

Kokoschka wrote that the painting was executed in his own very particular, non-Renaissance type of perspective:

In the Self-portrait of a Degenerate Artist I’ve used only my own private perspective. That’s why you can walk on this face like a fly, like a Chinese in a painted landscape; and if you wish you can be transformed in this painting and hold fast to your nose like a newborn innocent child if danger threatens to destroy you in the whirlpool of life. And this, my very own or (let’s say) the Chinese or Van Eyck perspective, I have realized here for the first time in the most accomplished way – better than in all my previous landscapes, better than my imitators could do, because one can only learn Cavalier’s perspective, which is a mechanical process; but not mine, because it’s the expression of my whole being and only I can express my being as such.

 (Oskar Kokoschka: 1886–1980, London 1986, p.318)

Kokoschka was born in Pöchlarn in Austria and studied art in Vienna. Invalided out of the army during the First World War, he was based mainly in Dresden until 1923. He spent the years from 1924 to 1930 travelling and from 1931 to 1934 returned to live in Vienna. In 1934 he moved to Prague, where he took out Czech citizenship. While painting this self-portrait, Kokoschka heard that eight of his works had been included in the Nazis’ exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’ which opened in Munich in July 1937. Kokoschka was in good company: Paul Klee (cat.86), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (cats 82 and 83), Erich Heckel (cat. 85) and Ernst Barlach were among over 100 artists whose work was featured in the show – which was intended to ridicule modern art. Kokoschka at first thought of the title Self-portrait of a Pilloried Artist, before finding the current and definitive title; it was first shown in July 1938 in the Exhibition of Twentieth-Century German Art, held at the New Burlington Galleries in London, with the ironic but defiant title Self-portrait of a Degenerate Artist.

After the Munich Agreement of September 1938, which effectively delivered Czechoslovakia into the hands of the Nazis, Kokoschka flew to London with Olda Palkovská. Belonging to a private collection, this celebrated self-portrait has been on long loan to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art since the 1970s.

This text was first published in Facing The World: Self Portraits from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei (2016)