How Kokoschka exploited these relationships to both advance his public career and satisfy his personal desires and needs during this difficult and transitional period is elaborated. Kokoschka's public / private nexus is examined in relation to his key ’manifesto’ paintings of these years, namely: Portrait of T. G. Masaryk (1936), Self-Portrait of a ’Degenerate’ Artist (1937–1938), and the large overlooked canvas The Fountain (1938). Considering his public image and private life together, a more adequate reckoning emerges to answer the question of how Czechoslovakia and Kokoschka's time there altered his self-conception and practice of being a modern artist, while also raising questions of what modernism had become by the 1930s in the West.
An art historian, Keith Holz's research is on the art of twentieth century Germany (ca. 1900-1945). He has published extensively on German exile artists and their artists' associations in Prague, Paris, and London during the 1930s. His book "Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague and London: Resistance and Acquiescence in a Democratic Public Sphere", Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, was published in 2004.
Keith Holz came to WIU in 2003. He has taught courses on Contemporary Art, Modern Art, History of Photography, History of Modern Design, American Art, German Art 1900-1945, as well as General Education courses (i.e.: Art History Survey, Introduction to Art, and Introduction to Visual Culture). He has also led seminars on Holocaust Representation in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, Women and Modern Art, and Art and Visual Culture in Nazi Germany.