Oskar Kokoschka
Who
Painter, printmaker and playwright, born on 1 March 1886 in Pochlarn, Austria. He studied at Vienna's School of Arts and Crafts from 1904, worked for the Wiener Werkstatte, and made his name with raw portraits between 1909 and 1914. Branded "degenerate" by the Nazis, he left for Prague in 1934 and Britain in 1938, became a British citizen in 1947, and died in Montreux on 22 February 1980.
Why they matter
Kokoschka was the wild one of Vienna 1900. Where Klimt painted surfaces, his early portraits used shrill colour and visible brushwork to paint the sitter's psychological state rather than a likeness, and his 1908 book The Dreaming Youths, which got him thrown out of art school, is now seen as foreshadowing Expressionism.
What to buy
Originals: his paintings are museum and top-auction material, but Kokoschka was a printmaker all his life, mostly in lithography with occasional drypoints, so his prints are the honest way in. He issued cycles for his own texts (Die chinesische Mauer, the Bach Cantata, Hiob, Orpheus und Eurydike), for the classics (King Lear, Penthesilea, The Women of Troy) and of places (Marrakesch, Manhattan, Jerusalem Faces). Single sheets from those cycles, not the paintings, are what a private buyer can realistically pursue. Check every sheet against the catalogue raisonne by Hans M. Wingler and Friedrich Welz, Oskar Kokoschka: Das druckgraphische Werk (Verlag Galerie Welz, Salzburg, 1975 and 1981, two volumes), where each print has a WW number; ask for it, and treat a seller who cannot give one as not having checked. The grail is Die traumenden Knaben: 500 copies were printed in Vienna in 1908 by Albert Berger and August Chwala, it sold so badly that few were bound, and in 1917 the publisher Kurt Wolff issued it again from Leipzig. The 1908 and 1917 issues are different things on the market, so ask which one is on offer. Prints: he is in copyright until 2050, so a poster is a licensed product; buy one that names the museum. Books: Wingler and Welz for prints; for the paintings, any recent museum catalogue.
Notes
The Fondation Oskar Kokoschka in Vevey, Switzerland, holds almost all of his graphic work. Tate has 36 works by him, among them Polperro II (1939), painted in Cornwall in exile. In 1960 he shared the Erasmus Prize with Marc Chagall. In copyright, so there are no free image archives for him.
Story
Kokoschka's affair with Alma Mahler, the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler, ran from 1912 to 1914 and produced his masterpiece, The Bride of the Wind. Then she rejected him.
In 1918 he wrote to Hermine Moos, a puppet maker in Munich, asking for a life-size doll of Alma. If she could make the woman of his dreams seem to come alive to his eyes and touch, he wrote, he would be deeply indebted to her inventiveness. His letters were obsessively detailed about materials and textures; he asked for fabric samples and test limbs. The doll arrived in early 1919, after some nine months' work, made of swan skin with the feathers on, over sawdust. He was bitterly disappointed. He had it dressed anyway, employed a maid to look after it, and painted it: Woman in Blue, now in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, was the first of a cycle of pictures of the doll and a turning point in his style.
Then, in the early 1920s, he gave a party for it, dragged it into the garden, cut off its head and broke a bottle of wine over it. It had, he said, cured him completely of his passion.
Key works
- Die traumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Youths), book with lithographs (1908) - MoMA; Yale University Art Gallery
- The Bride of the Wind (1913-14) - Kunstmuseum Basel
- Woman in Blue (1919) - Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
- Polperro II (1939) - Tate
In museum collections
- Knight Errant (1915)
Guggenheim ↗ - Corona I (1918)
National Gallery of Art ↗ - Self-Portrait (1913)
National Gallery of Art ↗ ยท MoMA ↗ - Walter Hasenclever (1917)
National Gallery of Art ↗ - Ambassador Ivan Maisky (1942)
Art UK ↗ - Apocalypse (triptych, centre panel) (1950)
Art UK ↗ - Artist and the Muse (Der Kunstler und die Muse) (1921)
National Gallery of Art ↗ - Bacchus (Bob Gesinus Visser I, 1933) (1933)
Minneapolis Institute of Art ↗ - Biarritz (1925)
Harvard Art Museums ↗ - Christ Helps the Hungry Children (1945)
National Gallery of Art ↗ - Cologne Cathedral (1956)
Minneapolis Institute of Art ↗ - Commerce Counselor Ebenstein (1908)
Art Institute of Chicago ↗
See the work
Prints
Books
Originals
See also
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