Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980)

Oskar KOKOSCHKA (Pochlarn 1886 - Montreux 1980)

Oskar Kokoschka was a Czech artist: painter, graphic artist and writer. Kokoschka was born in Pöchlarn on the Danube. He came from a Prague Czech family, the second of four children. His father was a goldsmith. In Vienna, after graduating from secondary school, he received a scholarship to the Kunstgewerbeschule and enrolled in subjects such as drawing, graphics and art history. From 1905 he started painting with oil paint without formal lessons. He also started an expressionist painting. His teacher Gustav Klimt called him the greatest talent of the younger generation after an exhibition in Vienna. At the Kunstgewerbeschule, where he studied from 1905 to 1908, he met the architect Adolf Loos, who introduced him to Karl Kraus, publisher of the satirical magazine Die Fackel. In 1908 Kokoschka painted his first portraits. In 1909 he was impressed by George Minne, Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh. He also finished his studies at the Kunstschool and also left the artists' collective the Wiener Werkstätte. At that time he was mainly occupied with portraits, theater plays and poems. In 1910, Kokoschka came into contact with the publisher of the magazine Der Sturm, which for the next few years was the most important avant-garde magazine in Germany in the field of art and literature. Kokoschka also gained more fame by placing works in this area. A little later, the first one-man exhibition of this painter was organised. In 1911 Kokoschka came into contact with Der Blaue Reiter, an avant-garde group in Munich. There he met the poet Albert Ehrenstein, with whom he remained friends all his life. In 1912 he took part in the second exhibition of the 'Blaue Reiter' in Munich. Kokoschka had a turbulent relationship with Alma Mahler-Schindler, the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler. He painted her portrait and traveled with her through Italy. From 1912 to 1914 he made a series of seven fans for Alma, on which the course of their relationship was symbolically depicted. She ended their relationship. Later, Alma learned that Kokoshka had been wounded during World War I. He recovered in 1916 and discovered that in 1915 Alma had married architect Walter Gropius. This is how Kokoshka became obsessed with Alma, the unattainable love. In his early works, Kokoschka quickly turned away from Jugendstil and turned those forms into an expressionist language. In addition to illustrative work, psychological-visionary portraits in a dramatic-nervous painting style were created as early major works. The figure and the psychological portrait have always remained the focus of his creations, both in paintings and in his extensive graphic oeuvre. It is a fact that the paintings and especially the portraits of Kokoschka do not disguise but rather expose the more hidden instincts of man, thereby evoking an understandable movement of resistance. The most important earliest work was The Bride of the Wind, a reflection on his ultimately unrequited love for Alma Mahler. In 1918 he became acquainted with Hermine Moos, who cut dolls. He ordered a life-size doll with the features of Alma Mahler and made several works after this doll. A trip to Florence made him fascinated by Michelangelo's work. This is how many watercolors were created. Under the influence of Fauvism, the German Expressionists and the Blaue Reiter, the color environment became brighter, the paint more pasty and the brushwork calmer, but his work remained subject to stylistic fluctuations. After recovering from his war wounds, Kokoschka got to know Kathe Richter's circle of friends in Dresden and painted them. In 1924 he settled in Paris, where he would return regularly between his many travels. He traveled to southern France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and England, as well as to Istanbul, Jerusalem and North Africa, Scotland, Ireland and Italy. These travels inspired him to create landscapes and new portraits. He also became very fascinated by the old masters Breughel and Altdorfer. After 1924, the long series of landscapes and cityscapes began, which partly show highly compressed overviews of places and partly are merely representative showpieces. Kokoschka responded to National Socialism and war with allegorical images and with the Self-portrait of a degenerate artist. In 1931 he gave up his residence in Paris and returned to Vienna, but left the city again after the Starhemberg Putsch of 1934 and, like many Czech emigrants, he moved to Prague, where he painted a portrait of President Masaryk, among other things. In the winter of 1934 he met his future wife, Olda Palkovska. In 1937 the government confiscated 417 of his works. During the Second World War he maintained close ties with Czech emigrants in his English exile.