Oskar Kokoschka Books

Oskar Kokoschka ((1886-1980) is one of Austria’s finest and most revered Expressionist artists. His paintings are renowned and admired for their vivid color and restless energy. This significant book focuses on the early portraits that Kokoschka painted in Vienna and Berlin on the eve of World War I. Perhaps the best known and most highly esteemed of all his works, these portraits are wonderful examples of Kokoschka’s use of exaggeration and distortion of color to convey deep emotion and psychological tension. They also present a fascinating look at many of the important intellectual figures of the era, for their subjects include Peter Altenberg, Adolf Loos, Alma Mahler, and Kokoschka himself (in his Self Portrait as Knight Errant). This beautifully illustrated book includes not only these arresting oil portraits but also some of Kokoschka’s drawings of the same sitters and a selection of the postcards, fans, and posters he made for the Wiener Werkstätte in the period before the portraits were completed, all of which shed light on his early development. There are also discussions by eminent authorities on the culture and history of Vienna and Berlin in the prewar period; Kokoschka’s shift from Art Nouveau to Expressionism; his place within the German and Austrian Expressionist movements; his reception in the United States; and much more.

In seinen großartigen erotischen Zeichnungen zeigt Oskar Kokoschka die Modelle in Momenten der Selbstvergessenheit. Nicht nur von diesen wunderbaren Werken geht der unwiderstehliche Charme des Skizzenbuchs aus, sondern auch von der Authentizität des Bandes, der einem das Gefühl vermittelt, ein Original des Künstlers in den Händen zu halten. Man gehört sozusagen zum intimen Freundeskreis des Meisters und darf einen Blick über seine Schulter werfen. Dieses Buch ist ein Muss für alle Grafik- und Erotiksammler!

Oskar Kokoschka was a prolific letter-writer for much of his long life, which spanned both World Wars and saw sweeping changes in art and society."

Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) is, along with Francis Picabia and Pablo Picasso, one of a generation of artists who retained their allegiance to figurative painting after the Second World War, even as abstract art was consolidating its predominance. It is also thanks to them that non-representational painting and figurative art can now be practised side by side without partisan feuding. Artists of the present day acknowledge their debt to Kokoschka in particular. The retrospective traces the motifs and motivations of a painter who felt at home in no fewer than five countries. It brings together 100 paintings and an equal number of works on paper, photographs and letters from all phases of his career. Two impressive triptychs, each around eight metres wide and two metres high – »The Prometheus Triptych« (1950, Courtauld Gallery, London) and »Thermopylae« (1954, University of Hamburg) – are the high point of Kokoschka’s mature oeuvre, and of this retrospective. The two works have only been shown together once before, at the Tate in 1962.

A major figure in the Expressionist movement, Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) studied in Vienna and was initially influenced by Art Nouveau, particularly Gustav Klimt's elegant style. Around 1909, he painted his first Expressionist portraits that reveal the emotional life of their subjects. The restless draftsmanship and broken color patterns in these works foreshadow his mature style, exemplified in paintings like Bride of the Wind from 1914. After being seriously wounded in World War I, Kokoschka produced little until 1924, when travels through Europe and North Africa revitalized his creativity. During this time, he experimented with color, particularly in landscapes that combined traditional spatial organization with vibrant colors and energetic brushwork. These visionary landscapes convey a passionate vision, oscillating between exhilaration and anguish. In the 1930s, the Nazi regime condemned his work as "degenerate," leading to the confiscation of his paintings from public collections. In 1938, he relocated to London, and later to Switzerland, where he spent much of his life. Kokoschka's late works maintain the Expressionist qualities of his earlier masterpieces, and while he never fully abandoned representation, their increasing abstraction hints at a connection to Abstract Expressionism.

The well-known painter, Oskar Kokoschka, also produced a considerable and significant body of literary work: plays, a few poems, essays and autobiographical stories. The present volume contains all his plays (some in more than one version) and the poems, plus one short prose passage.All the pieces in this collection, apart from the play Comenius, were written in the period 1907-1918. The plays, despite Kokoschka’s dislike of the term, reflect the style of Expressionism current in Germany during the period. Indeed, the early ones anticipated and, to as certain extent, helped to define Expressionism. The titles of some – Job, The Burning Bush, Orpheus and Eurydice – reflect the use of the mythic mode. Comenius, which was started in the 1930s and only completed in 1972, is a large-scale historical panorama, focusing on the figure of the Czech humanist and educational reformer, Jan Amos Komenský. Comenius’ fate reflects Kokoschka’s own experience of an increasingly dark world of conflict and oppression. His ideal of a humanity guided by the light of reason cannot find realization amid the strife and carnage of the Thirty Years’ War; at the end of the play it is reduced to a tiny spot of light in Rembrandt’s picture The Night Watch. The Burning Bush, Orpheus and Eurydice and Comenius appear in English translation for the first time.

Book by Richard Calvocoressi, Katharina Schulz