Oskar Kokoschka

Biography

In 1908 the Vienna Kunstschau showed Oskar Kokoschka’s book “The Dreaming Youths”: eight colour lithographs for his own poem. The commission had been for something else, a children’s book for the Wiener Werkstätte (the Vienna Workshops, an arts-and-crafts cooperative), but Kokoschka made illustrations to verses written a year earlier. Conservative officials were outraged, only a small part of the five hundred copies was bound and sold, and the author himself was expelled from the school of applied arts.

Yet other patrons appeared.

He was born on 1 March 1886 in Pöchlarn, the son of Gustav Josef Kokoschka, a goldsmith and travelling salesman; his father’s ancestors were Prague goldsmiths. The following year the family moved to Vienna. His teacher Carl Otto Czeschka noticed his drawings and took him into his class, and Kokoschka studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule, the Vienna school of arts and crafts (the start of his studies is given variously as 1903, 1904 or 1905; the end as 1909). Gustav Klimt, to whom “The Dreaming Youths” is dedicated, is also named among his teachers. He had no systematic training in painting, and, it seems to me, this shows in his early canvases: the paint is scratched with fingernails and rubbed in with fingers. His first commissions came from the Wiener Werkstätte: postcards and drawings for children.

The decisive figure was the architect Adolf Loos. He introduced Kokoschka to the Viennese avant-garde and commissioned portraits of his clients and friends, and if a sitter refused to pay, he bought the picture himself. This is how the portraits of 1909–1914 came about: the critic Karl Kraus, the poet Peter Altenberg, the art dealer Herwarth Walden, the art historians Hans and Erica Tietze. In the double portrait of the Tietzes the couple do not look at each other, but their hands reach out. At the same time he wrote the play “Murderer, the Hope of Women”, staged in Vienna in 1909 amid scandal. In 1921 Paul Hindemith made an opera from it.

In 1910 Kokoschka went to Berlin. Herwarth Walden took him on as an illustrator for the magazine Der Sturm, which printed twenty-eight of his drawings in its first year, and the dealer Paul Cassirer introduced him to international circles.

In 1912 a love affair began with Alma Mahler, the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler. Two years later she broke with him, and in 1915 she married Walter Gropius. Kokoschka went on loving her afterwards. “The Bride of the Wind” (1913–1914) is dedicated to this relationship: the title was given by the poet Georg Trakl, who came into the studio while Kokoschka was working on the canvas. In 1918 Kokoschka commissioned a life-size doll modelled on Alma from the Munich dollmaker Hermine Moos; the doll disappointed him, and he destroyed it.

In the First World War he volunteered for the cavalry of the Austrian army. In 1915 he was seriously wounded on the Eastern Front: by a shot to the head and a bayonet thrust to the lung; the bullet damaged the labyrinth of his ear. Doctors judged him mentally unstable. In 1916 he worked as a war artist at the front on the Isonzo. From 1919 he taught at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts (until 1923, 1924 or 1926: the dates vary), then set off travelling through Europe, North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, bringing back city views and landscapes. In 1922 his works were shown at the Venice Biennale. Ernst Krenek wrote an opera based on his play “Orpheus and Eurydice”, staged in Kassel in 1926.

In 1931 Kokoschka returned to Vienna, and in 1934, after his mother’s death, he fled the Nazis to Prague. There he painted views of the city with the Charles Bridge and a portrait of President Masaryk, met his future wife Olda Palkovská, and in 1935 received Czechoslovak citizenship. The Nazis called his works “degenerate art”: 417 of his paintings were confiscated from museums, and in 1937 his pictures were shown in the exhibition “Degenerate Art”. He painted “Self-Portrait of a ‘Degenerate Artist’”. In 1937 émigrés in Prague founded the Oskar Kokoschka League; he himself, by some accounts, did not take part, so as not to put his family at risk.

In 1938, when mobilisation was announced in Czechoslovakia, Kokoschka fled to the United Kingdom. In 1941 he married Olda in London, and during the bombing he settled in Polperro in Cornwall. There he painted a view of the harbour and the allegory “The Crab”, and in London the painting “The Red Egg” on the Munich Agreement. He often spent the summers in Scotland, where he painted watercolours and worked in coloured pencil. He received British citizenship in 1946 or 1947 and regained Austrian citizenship in 1975 or 1978: the dates are given variously.

From 1953 Kokoschka lived in Switzerland, in Villeneuve on Lake Geneva. In the same year, together with Friedrich Welz, he founded in Salzburg the summer academy known as the “School of Seeing”, where he taught. His works were shown at documenta in Kassel in 1955, 1959 and 1964, and a retrospective was held at the Tate Gallery in 1962. He designed stage productions, in 1964 “The Magic Flute” in Salzburg. In 1960 he received the Erasmus Prize. In 1966 he won the competition for the portrait of Konrad Adenauer for the Bundestag, the German parliament.

Oskar Kokoschka died on 22 February 1980 in Montreux and was buried in the cemetery at Clarens. The prize named after him, established in the same year, is awarded by the Austrian government.