Oskar Kokoschka 1886-1980

Artist, poet, playwright and teacher Oskar Kokoschka was born in Pöchlarn, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1886. He studied at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) and became an associate of the Wiener Werkstätte design workshops in 1907. He exhibited at the first Vienna Kunstschau in 1909 and held his first solo show at the Galerie Paul Cassirer, Berlin in 1910, also contributing to Herwarth Walden’s Expressionist periodical Der Sturm. During the First World War he was wounded, while serving on the eastern front and settled in Dresden while recovering in 1917. The first monograph of his work was published by Paul Westheim in 1918 and the following year Kokoshka became a professor at the Akademie. During the 1920s and 1930s he travelled widely in Europe (including London in 1925 and 1926), North Africa, and the Middle East, returning to Vienna in 1931, where his defence of the Jewish painter Max Liebermann brought him into opposition with the Nazi regime. Escaping Vienna’s political turmoil, he moved to Prague in 1934 to paint a commissioned portrait of Czechoslovakian president Tomáš G. Masaryk. In 1937 eight of Kokoschka’s paintings were included in the Nazis’ Entartete Kunst (‘degenerate art’) exhibition including a Self-Portrait, that he afterwards reworked to ironically reflect the ‘degenerate’ label. The following July, 19 of his works were included in the London exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art at the New Burlington Galleries, intended as a riposte to the Nazi show. In October 1938 Kokoschka and Olda Palkovská, his future wife, fled to England, settling initially in London. He exhibited in the First Group Exhibition of German Austrian Czechoslovakian Painters and Sculptors at the Wertheim Gallery in 1939 and served as Honorary President of the Free German League of Culture (FGLC) from 1941, after a brief spell in Cornwall. Their North London circle included German Jewish refuge artist Fred Uhlman, through whose wife Diana, daughter of the Conservative MP Henry Page Croft, Kokoschka was commissioned to paint portraits of Michael and Posy Croft, also painting the Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky (1943, Tate). In 1947 the émigrée art historian Edith Hoffmann authored the first English-language Kokoschka monograph and in 1950 he was commissioned by Count Antoine Seilern to create a monumental ceiling mural, the Prometheus Triptych (now The Courtauld Institute of Art), for his London house. In 1953 the Kokoschkas left England for Villeneuve in Switzerland. A retrospective was held at the Tate Gallery in 1962. In this period Kokoschka was commissioned by German-Jewish émigré Bernhard Baer, director of the Ganymed Press in London, to create 16 original lithographs for a deluxe limited edition of Shakespeare’s King Lear, which Kokoschka called his ‘most beloved work in print’, disseminated through Marlborough Fine Art in London by Viennese-born gallerist Harry Fischer. In 1966 Pragueborn émigré art historian J. P. Hodin published his Kokoschka biography; followed by the artist’s own autobiography in 1974. Oskar Kokoschka died in Montreux, Switzerland on 22nd February 1980. His works are held in major collections in the UK including the Ben Uri Collection, the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the Tate and the V&A, as well as many international collections.