Modernity Met With Hope and Despair.

The jewel-box repository of German and Austrian art known as the Neue Galerie has organized ''Focus: Oskar Kokoschka,'' a nice, small exhibition of works by this Viennese Expressionist. More a taste-whetter than a substantial introduction, it presents six of the early oil-on-canvas portraits that made his reputation before World War I and about 40 works on paper, including book illustrations, drawings, watercolors and posters. The show's cumulative effect is a feverish mix of hope and despair, an anguished reaction to humanity's plight in the tightening grip of modernity. That tension is vividly suggested in a wood-paneled room where the portraits preside over a lavish display of tableware, furniture and jewelry designed by Josef Hoffmann, Dagobert Peche, Koloman Moser and other players in the Wiener Werkstatte movement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]