KOKOSCHKA, OSKAR

born , March 1, 1886, Pchlarn, Austria died Feb. 22, 1980, Villeneuve, Switz. Austrian painter and writer, one of the leading exponents of Expressionism. In his early portraits, gesture and miming intensify the psychological penetration of character; especially powerful among his later works are allegories of the artist's militant humanism. His dramas, poems, and prose are significant for their psychological insight and stylistic daring. When Kokoschka was three years old, his father lost everything in a financial crash. The family was forced to move to Vienna, where his father worked as a travelling salesman, and his mother cared for the children on limited means. Tragedy entered Kokoschka's life early, when his eldest brother died in 1891. Kokoschka attended elementary and high school in Vienna and received his first artistic impressions from the stained glass and Baroque frescoes of the Piarist church where he sang in the choir. At the age of 18, Kokoschka won a scholarship to the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) in Vienna. Soon he became an assistant teacher, giving lessons at night and studying during the day. By 1907 he had also become a member of the Wiener Werksttte (Vienna Crafts Studio), which supplied him with commissions until 1909. At the Kunstgewerbeschule he learned drawing, lithography, bookbinding, and other crafts. He was profoundly dissatisfied with the school, however, because it was devoted entirely to the decorative arts and completely omitted from its curriculum the study of the human figure. The Vienna Crafts Studio, too, supported work only in the restrictive field of the decorative arts. From the beginning Kokoschka's primary artistic interest was the human figure; this interest is perhaps rooted in the deep concern for humanity that transcended even his concern for art. He tried to find practical means to pursue this interest. In his night classes he introduced the thin, muscular children of acrobats as models for his pupils, teaching the latter to make quick sketchesan innovation completely opposed to the aims of the school. He used the human figure as a decorative motif in the postcards, bookbindings, and bookplates he designed for Vienna Crafts Studio commissions. Still, his real desire was to paint monumental pictures of people. He taught himself to paint in oils and executed some canvases; but economic necessity forced him to spend most of his time with decorative work, and the general artistic milieu in which he found himself continued in its failure to support his creative aspirations. In 1908 he met the prominent Viennese architect Adolf Loos, who, having been impressed by one of Kokoschka's early paintings, took an active interest in the young artist. Like Kokoschka, Loos rejected the prevailing decorative ideal, and he enthusiastically launched Kokoschka's artistic career by introducing him to sympathetic artists, securing him commissions for paintings, and providing him with much-needed spiritual inspiration and support. During this early period Kokoschka painted mostly landscapes, developing a technique of vibrant, fluid lines and colours expressive of mood that formed the basis for all of his subsequent paintings. At first glance Kokoschka's landscapes seem to follow the principles of the Impressionist school because of their bright colours, ephemeral delineation of shapes, with tangled, multicoloured lines, and preoccupation with light. His vision, however, was different from that of the Impressionists, who sought, albeit in a revolutionary way, to represent only what strikes the eye. Kokoschka sought to express through his colours the inner sensibility of the observer viewing a scene. This aim is exemplified in one of his earliest paintings, Dent du Midi (1909), a snowscape in which the colours are warm, reflecting the response of the observer to the scene, rather than cool, evoking the actual light that must have emanated from the snow. At about this time Kokoschka began his career as a writer, composing several plays that heralded the new Expressionist theatre and expressed his compassionately humanist philosophy. The most important of them was Mrder Hoffnung der Frauen (1907; Murderer the Women's Hope), a play that expressed his sensitivity to the moral crises of modern life and that was outspoken in condemning the political injustices of contemporary European society. He said in 1933 that in it he contrasted the callousness of our male society with my basic conception of man as mortal and woman as immortal; in the modern world it is only the murderer who wishes to reverse this state of affairs. After a year in Berlin, where his first collective show was held, Kokoschka returned to Vienna in 1911, resuming his teaching at the School of Arts and Crafts. He exhibited paintings and drawings at Der Sturm gallery, where they hung alongside works of the Russian Wassily Kandinsky, the Swiss Paul Klee, and the German Franz Marc. Soon public reaction to Kokoschka's plays caused such a scandal that he was dismissed from his teaching post. In 1911 he met Alma Mahler, seven years his senior and the widow of the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler. He fell in love with her, and for three years they pursued a tempestuous affair that Kokoschka much later described as the most unquiet time of my life. He succeeded in ending his involvement with her only with the outbreak of World War I and his enlistment in the Austrian army. About 1908, shortly before his return to Vienna, Kokoschka had begun to paint portraits that show an extremely sensitive preoccupation with the character of the subjects and an increasing concern with expressing this character through colour. The earlier of these portraits make use of delicate, agitated lines describing figures painted in relatively naturalistic colours; solid colours are varied with multihued highlights, and certain features and gestures characteristic of the sitters or expressive of their psychology are exaggerated. Among these portraits, which secured Kokoschka's early reputation, are those of Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat (1909), Peter Altenberg (1909), and Auguste Forel (1910). From about 1912 these portraits, though still concentrating on hands and faces, are painted with increasingly broader strokes of more varied colour and heavier outlines, which, however, are broken and no longer solidly enclose forms. Among the works painted in this manner are Double Portrait (Oskar Kokoschka and Alma Mahler) (1912) and Self-Portrait, Pointing to the Breast (1913). Kokoschka's most important painting of this period (The Tempest; 1914) shows the artist and Alma Mahler resting together in a huge cockleshell in the midst of a raging sea. In this virtually monochromatic composition, all the forms are described by large, loose strokes of colour, and the direction of the strokes seems to cause the entire composition to swirl and spin. In all of these paintings, as with the landscapes, the emotional involvement of the artist with the subject is an essential element, and this element continued to be the basis of his art throughout his life. In 1962 Kokoschka was to say, Painting . . . isn't based on three dimensions, but on four. The fourth dimension is a projection of myself. . . . The other three dimensions are based on the vision of both eyes . . . ; the fourth dimension is based on the essential nature of vision, which is creative. Kokoschka saw active duty in World War I for only a short time. In 1916 he was severely wounded and was taken to a military hospital in Vienna, then to one in Dresden. While recovering in Dresden he wrote, produced, designed, and staged three plays. In Orpheus und Eurydike (1918; Orpheus and Eurydice) he expressed the terror he had experienced after being wounded. This play was adapted as an opera in 1926 by the German composer Ernst Krenek. The war and the takeover of the Russian Revolution by the Bolshevik regime disillusioned Kokoschka, as it did many intellectuals who had identified revolution with humanitarianism. He began to see revolution as a purely destructive force, and in 1920 he wrote a Dresden Manifesto, which denounced all militancy in politics for its lack of human concern. Political and humanitarian themes disappeared for several years from his writing and art. The next 10 years he taught, primarily as a professor of fine arts at the Dresden Academy (191923), and traveled in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, where he painted a series of landscapes that mark the second peak of his career. These panoramic views of cities or mountains, mostly seen from a high vantage point, are lyrical in mood and communicate effects of light and atmosphere through Kokoschka's characteristically nervous brushstrokes and agitated compositions. Among these works are London: Large Thames View (1926), Jerusalem (192930), and Prague: Charles Bridge (with Boat) (1934). In 1931 Kokoschka returned again to Vienna, where he completed his first political commission since the war, a joyful painting of children playing at an orphanage established by the socialist city council. This painting was meant as a protest against the reactionary policies of the current Austrian chancellor. In 1934 he moved to Prague, where he met Olda Palkovska, his future wife. In Prague he was commissioned to do a portrait of the president of the Czech Republic, the philosopher Tom Masaryk. During the sittings he discussed with the aged statesman the philosophy of the 17th-century Moravian theologian John Amos Comenius, whose humanitarian views Kokoschka had admired from his youth. Kokoschka placed Comenius in the background of Masaryk's portrait, creating an allegory of the humanistic spirit from past to present. Comenius also became the subject of another play (Comenius, begun 1935). In 1937 all of Kokoschka's works in Germany were removed by the Nazis from museums and collections as degenerate art. This act outraged Kokoschka less for his own sake than because it boded ill for the future of culture and humanity. The same year, a great Kokoschka exhibition was held in Vienna, but Kokoschka was not encouraged. After the Munich Agreement between the English prime minister Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler in 1938, he fled to London with Olda Palkovska. Kokoschka's financial situation was so desperate in London that he was forced to paint mainly in watercolour. He completed a number of large canvases, however, entitled The Red Egg (194041), Anschluss-Alice in Wonderland (1942), Loreley (1942), Marianne-Maquis (1943), and What We Are Fighting For (1943), which were an antifascist manifesto. They express his distress at the sufferings of humanity and are free from narrow ideological considerations, however; the series is an indictment of all the powers, not just the fascist, that had caused suffering in World War II. In 1942 Kokoschka also painted a portrait of the Russian ambassador to London, Ivan Maysky, which contains a subtle warning against Soviet imperialism. The style of this painting is loose and expressive but calmer and more solid than that of his second Viennese period. He donated the fee for the portrait to the Red Cross for the care of German and Russian soldiers wounded at Stalingrad. He became a British subject in 1947. After the war, beginning with a large but still basically unappreciated exhibition in Vienna, there began a series of shows of Kokoschka's works all over Europe and the United States. Kokoschka was financially secure for the first time. He continued to paint portraits and landscapes. Among Kokoschka's late landscapes that retain the energy of his earlier works are View of Hamburg Harbour (1951), Delphi (1956), Vienna: State Opera (1956), and Lbeck: Jakobikirche (1958). In 1950 Kokoschka did his first major mythological composition, the three paintings of the Prometheus Saga. In 1953 Kokoschka moved to Switzerland and established a seminar called Schule des Sehens (School of Seeing) at the Internationale Sommerakademie fr bildende Kunst (International Summer Academy for Visual Arts) in Salzburg. He continued to paint, completing in 1954 a second mythological trilogy, Thermopylae. In the 1950s he designed tapestries and theatrical scenery and worked increasingly in lithography. He also continued his political art; his two moving posters of 1937 and 1945 protesting the effects of the Spanish Civil War and World War II on the children of Europe were followed in 1956 by a poster for Hungarian relief showing a stricken mother and a dead child. Kokoschka's last paintings are perhaps best characterized by his Herodotos (196063), a luminously painted picture of the Greek historian inspired by visionary historical figures that appear above his head. Kokoschka's late style is calmer and brighter than that of his early works, but some critics missed in the late paintings the agitation and surface intensity of his early masterpieces. Kokoschka's My Life (1964) is an excellent autobiography. Ludwig Goldscheider The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica Additional reading Biographical and critical studies include Edith Hoffmann, Kokoschka: Life and Work (1947); Hans Maria Wingler, Oskar Kokoschka: The Work of the Painter (1958); Bernhard Bultmann, Oskar Kokoschka (1961); J.P. Hodin, Oskar Kokoschka: The Artist and His Time (1966); Henry I. Schvey, Oskar Kokoschka: The Painter as Playwright (1982); Oskar Kokoschka, 18861980 (1986), an exhibition catalog; Frank Whitford, Oskar Kokoschka, a Life (1986); Serge Sabarsky, Oskar Kokoschka: Drawings and Watercolors: The Early Years, 19061924 (1986); and Klaus Albrecht Schrder and Johann Winkler (eds.), Oskar Kokoschka (1991).