Oskar Kokoschka

Mar 01, 1886 - Feb 22, 1980

Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian artist, poet and playwright best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes. Kokoschka's early career was marked by portraits of Viennese celebrities, painted in a nervously animated style. He served in the Austrian army in World War I and was wounded. At the hospital, the doctors decided that he was mentally unstable. Nevertheless, he continued to develop his career as an artist, traveling across Europe and painting the landscape. Kokoschka's literary works are as peculiar and interesting as his art. His dramas, poems, and prose are significant for their psychological insight and stylistic daring as the novel "Murderer, the Hope of Women" (1909) is often called the first Expressionist drama. He exhibited paintings and drawings in Vienna (1911) where they hung alongside works of the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, the Swiss artist Paul Klee, and the German artist Franz Marc. The war and the takeover of the Russian Revolution by the Bolshevik regime disillusioned Kokoschka, he began to see revolution as a purely destructive force. Political and humanitarian themes disappeared for several years from his writing and art. During the 1920s he painted a series of landscapes that mark the second peak of his career. These panoramic views of cities and mountains are lyrical in mood and communicate effects of light and atmosphere through Kokoschka’s characteristically nervous brushstrokes and agitated compositions. Deemed a degenerate by the Nazis, with the help of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (later The Czech Refugee Trust Fund), all members of the OKB were able to escape through Poland and Sweden. Kokoschka became a British citizen in 1946 and only in 1978 would regain Austrian citizenship. His late style is calmer and brighter than that of his early works, but some critics claim that the late paintings lack the agitation and surface intensity of his early masterpieces He traveled briefly to the United States in 1947 before settling in Switzerland, where he lived the rest of his life.