The Tiger Lion’s Cage –
Oskar Kokoschka and the image of the animal
Oskar Kokoschka, Tigerlöwe, 1926, Belvedere, Wien
In the early morning, before the zoo was open, Oskar Kokoschka was already waiting at the bars of the cage, easel at the ready. Everything was quiet. Suddenly, a yellow shadow burst out of the darkness – a leap, a snarl, a glare. The Tiger Lion hurled itself against the bars. For Kokoschka, a moment of absolute presence and an encounter of colour, form and energy that etched itself onto his painting.
JESSICA KEILHOLZ-BUSCH
A hybrid creature as a sensation
In the 1920s, the main attraction at Regent’s Park Zoo in London was a Tiger Lion – a cross between a tiger and a lion. Simultaneously familiar and alien, the animal united two of the most awe-inspiring big cats in one body. Kokoschka was fascinated by the hybrid creature. He applied for a special artist’s permit and was allowed to approach within a few metres of the cage. He described the animal springing towards him out of the darkness »like a yellow missile of flame«1 as if to tear him to pieces. The painting captures that confrontation.
Wildness as imagery
Kokoschka’s Tigerlöwe crackles with tension between the big cat and the viewer. The animal’s head takes up most of the picture, with its gaping mouth and fixed stare. Far from being in captivity, it seems to be on the point of breaking free. The colours and lines are raw, almost erupting from the canvas. The painting is not a naturalistic portrait, but an emotional statement, an explosion of wildness.
Kokoschka’s depiction marks an iconic development in Modernist art. Animals, particularly non-European species, became catalysts of a liberation from the constraints of form. Formal constraints. For many artists, the physical power and unpredictable behaviour of the creatures were a counter-world to the civilised, mechanised modern age.
Hybrid bodies –
Between projection and liberation
The Tiger Lion is more than a mere zoological curiosity. The depiction of the hybrid creature represents the transgression of boundaries, both biological and symbolic. For Kokoschka, the predator was a projection of the unfettered, the unexpected; an echo of everything that was suppressed in the modern age.
Clearly, animals appear not only as creatures under observation, but as mirrors and reflections. They challenge, unsettle, assault boundaries. Zoos, as artificial settings exhibiting what is foreign and different, are particularly notable environments for questions of power, representation and projection.
Oskar Kokoschka, The Mandrill, 1926, Museum Bojmanns van Beuningen
Oskar Kokoschka 1926
Animals as physical expressions of modernism
As with Franz Marc, Kokoschka likewise presents animal images that depict shifts away from idyll and towards ambivalence. Animals are no longer mere metaphors for naturalness, but carriers for inner states, symbols of cultural change or even precursors of political conflicts. Their depictions are always coloured by the human-animal relationship: who is the viewer, and who is on show? Who is free, and who is not?
While I was painting him, I realised he was a wild, isolated fellow, almost a reflection of me.
– Oskar Kokoschka
These words refer to Kokoschka’s portrait of a mandrill, an ape with a strikingly colourful face, recorded by the artist not in zoological, but in emotional terms. The mandrill becomes his counterpart: vulnerable, angry, misunderstood. Instead of pointing out his otherness, the expressive portrayal highlights an inner affinity between outcasts. Kokoschka’s painting of the animal is less a study and more a self-interrogation, a projection, while at the same time an examination of existential isolation.
Wilderness as a staged environment
Compare the directness of Kokoschka’s portrayal – the instant at the bars, the big cat’s snarl, its leap towards the light – to the powerful staging behind that experience. The famous Tiger Lion that confronted Kokoschka was not a »wild« animal in the conventional sense, but the result of deliberate cross-breeding; it was probably born in the menagerie of an Indian maharaja before being presented to London Zoo as a gift in 1924. As with many encounters in zoos, the wildness expressed by Kokoschka in his painting had already been moulded by cultural influences, tamed by cages and fences and groomed for the urban eye.2
Modern art in particular lent new vitality to animals like this one, often eking out an apathetic existence in their cages; it imbued them with new life in their expressive lines, bright colours and dynamic compositions. The artworks restored an immediacy to the animals that they had long since shed in reality. The revitalisation of the »wilderness« took place on the canvas, not in the cage.
This conflict between observation viewing and construction, projection and reality, permeates the animal portraits of modernist art, and highlights the colonial power dynamics in which animals (and humans) were presented as »other«, exhibited, classified and aesthetically appropriated.
Franz Marc’s comparison of artistic renewal with the »conquest of a colony«3 in his first article for the almanac Der Blaue Reiter may have involuntarily unmasked his views, yet it exemplifies the contradictory relationship with »nature« in modernism, between longing, appropriation and distance.4
