Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian artist, playwright and poet, who represented Expressionism movement. Throughout his life, Kokoschka was concerned with expressing human character and psychology through effects of color, formal distortion and violent brushwork.
Background
Oskar Kokoschka was born on March 1, 1886 in Pochlarn, Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Pochlarn, Austria). He was the son of Gustav Josef Kokoschka, a goldsmith, and Maria Romana Kokoschka. Oskar had a sister Berta and a brother Bohuslav.
Education
Initially, Oskar Kokoschka studied at a Realschule, a type of secondary school, where emphasis was placed on the study of modern subjects, such as the sciences and language. Kokoschka was not interested in such subjects, as he only excelled in art and spent most of his time, reading classic literature during his lessons.
Later, since 1904 to 1909, the artist studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where he was influenced by his teacher Carl Otto Czeschka in developing an original style.
In 1960, Oxford University assigned him an honorary doctorate.
Oskar Kokoschka's early career was marked by portraits of Viennese celebrities, painted in a nervously animated style. Also, in this early period, Kokoschka wrote plays, that are considered among the first examples of expressionist drama. In 1910, sponsored by his friend and prominent architect, Adolf Loos, Kokoschka made his first journey abroad, painting landscapes and portraits in Switzerland. He also went to Berlin, where he supplied his works for the periodical "Der Sturm".
By World War I, he had become famous in Austria and Germany. Seriously wounded at the Russian front in 1916, Kokoschka was invalided to Dresden. Then, Oscar began a series of journeys, that lasted until 1931. He painted people, landscapes and great cities of practically every country in Europe and North Africa. In the magnificent landscape series, the artist used Impressionist techniques, interpreted in a highly personal, dramatic manner. Kokoschka lived in Vienna from 1931 to 1934, when he moved to Prague. He painted this city more than any other, with London, taking the second place.
In 1919, Oskar was appointed a professor at Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.
In 1938, Kokoschka and his wife Olda, emigrated to London, where they stayed during World War II. In 1947, the artist became a British citizen. After the war, he made several journeys, all as important for his later work, as were his travels in the 1920s. He traveled to Italy, the United States and Germany.
In 1953, Kokoschka moved from London to Villeneuve on Lake Geneva, Switzerland. That year, deciding to counteract the spread of abstract art, he founded the School of Seeing in Salzburg. In 1962, the artist had a retrospective exhibition of paintings, drawings, lithographs, stage designs and books at the Tate Gallery in London.
Kokoschka's late paintings have a brighter palette, but lacked the intensely nervous brushstrokes of his earlier Expressionist paintings. Despite his failing eyesight, Kokoschka continued to paint during his 90s. He left a number of interviews, a volume of collected writings and wrote an autobiography entitled "My Life" (1974).
Poster Design for the Jubilee Procession of the Kaiser
Girl with a Yellow Headband
The red egg
Female nude seated on the ground
Still life with a slaughtered lamb
Gitta Wallerstein
Loreley
Dent du Midi
Venice - Boats on the Dogana
Two children
Venice Dogana
Traveler in a Thunderstorm
Ludwing Ritter von Janikowsky
Man and Woman on the Road to Death
Lyon
The so-called Savoyard boy
Portrait of a Young Girl
Self-Portrait with Doll
Pieta
Conte Verona
The Woman Leads the Man
Martha Hirsch
Self-portrait of a 'Degenerate Artist'
Flight into Egypt
Self-Portrait (bust with pen)
Two Nudes (Lovers)
Nude Girl Standing
The Annunciation
Cardinal della Costa
Girl with hands raised
The Distant Island
Dolomite Landscape: Tre Croci
Views
Quotations:
"Consciousness is a sea ringed with visions."
"All that's left now is purely poetic work, putting more life into individual places, as I've made so sure of the fundamental mood and dimension of expression that it won't leave me groping around in uncertainty anymore."
"True dreams and visions should be as visible to the artist as the phenomena of the objective world."
"I used to be too subjective, and I was always tempted to find my inner self in the exterior and dissipate my imagination on other people and on life."
"The most fundamental in me is coming uppermost, and the transient, the sensational, is dispersing, because it can't adversely influence what is essential to me."
"In the midst of the confusions of nature one person trusting eternally in another, and making himself and the other secure through faith."
"Intellectually, I am already an old man. But in the sensory area, I am still such a child! I shuffle on my bottom between the two."
"I try to keep my sitters moving and talking, to make them forget they are being painted. This has nothing to do with extracting intimate secrets or confessions, but rather with establishing, in motion, an essential image of the kind that remains in memory or recurs in dreams."
Connections
Kokoschka had a passionate, often stormy affair with Alma Mahler. It began in 1912, shortly after the death of her four-year-old daughter Maria Mahler. After several years of their relationships, Alma rejected him, explaining, that she was afraid of being too overcome with passion.