Kokoschka's private life had latterly become so difficult, so
overcharged with complications that, when the war broke out in
1914, he rushed into it as though it might bring him relief.
Paradoxical as this may sound, he escaped into the war. Vienna,
with her constant scandals, had now definitely become too nar-
row for him. Everything he did only provoked the embittered
enmity of the most influential people. In 1913 his friends had
made a new attempt to establish him--this time as an art master
at a girls' private school, which was directed by a well-known
figure in Vienna life, Frau Dr. Eugenie Schwarzwald. The first
thing that Kokoschka did here was to introduce the principles of
Komensky whose Orbis Pictus was still to play a great part
in his later life. Enthusiastically he had absorbed the ancient
pedagogue's idea that education ought to be less burdened with
theoretical knowledge and more derived from visual experience.
But the parents of his pupils could not be persuaded to follow
him in such matters; they feared that the activities of a young
man as notorious as Kokoschka had become in Vienna could
hardly be a beneficial influence on their daughters. Public atten-
tion was soon drawn to his presence at an institution which had
already been suspect for its many reforms, and the authorities,
who had never forgiven him the disturbances he had caused in
the past, banned him altogether from teaching in Austrian
schools. Kokoschka was now sufficiently independent to resist
such a blow. But his feelings towards the authorities of his native
country grew so embittered that he decided to turn his back upon
them as soon as possible. He was never entirely to get over these
experiences of his early years; it is owing to them that he became
extremely sensitive to unreasonable criticism, and has always
been activated by the desire to prove to everybody--and most of
all to himself--that he could do everything he wanted, every-
thing that anybody else did, rather better than anybody else
could do it; his argument with the authorities has, so to speak,

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