OK – Oskar Kokoschka

In May 1913, the Kunsthaus Zürich, under its Director Dr Wilhelm Wartmann, exhibits twelve Expressionist portraits by the artist, who is still largely unknown in Switzerland, with the “grotesque” and “brutal” images generating headlines.

The “Züricher Post” writes: “When one reaches the place where the Oskar Kokoschka images hang, one’s first reaction is to step back in horror. It is as if figures from E. T. A. Hoffmann were suddenly manifesting themselves in the flickering light of the inn. [...] Gradually, the initial sense of repulsion wanes, one is drawn further and further into the pictures, and they begin to captivate and fascinate.”

On 14 April 1917, the Swiss première of Kokoschka’s play “Sphinx and Strawman” takes place at the Galerie Dada on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse, with the Dadaists Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings and Friedrich Glauser all taking part; Kokoschka himself is not directly involved. The Jewish poet Albert Ehrenstein reads his own verses on Kokoschka.

At the same, time, the gallery’s “Sturm” exhibition displays portraits by Kokoschka alongside works by Max Ernst, Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.

That same year, the Kunsthaus Zürich also includes him in an exhibition of German artists. It shows him again a year later, this time in the context of Viennese painting.

In August 1923, Kokoschka, who is now a professor of art at the Dresden Academy, travels to central Switzerland and Lake Geneva. The holiday, taken together with the Russian Anna (Niuta) Kallin, is actually an escape from Dresden: he claims in a letter to his mother to be “heartily sick” of the city.

In September and October, the Kunstsalon Wolfsberg in Zurich shows 71 of his watercolours, drawings and prints, advertising the presentation with the colour lithograph “Self-Portrait from Two Sides”.

A year later, Kokoschka deposits 70,000 Marks – the proceeds from the first substantial sale of his works – with a Swiss bank.

Oskar Kokoschka’s most comprehensive solo exhibition to date is held in 1927, once again at the Kunsthaus Zürich. His energetic champion Wilhelm Wartmann wants to provide as comprehensive an overview as possible. Importing the exhibits, all but one of which are in foreign ownership, causes some difficulties. Four of them are subsequently acquired by the Kunsthaus, and two by the Kunstmuseum Winterthur.

In all, ten exhibitions including works by Kokoschka take place under the auspices of Wartmann, whom Kokoschka calls “one of the few people with a real understanding of art today” (letter to Bettina A., 1 April 1953).

Despite the difficulties encountered by its first solo show devoted to Kokoschka, the Kunsthaus Zürich mounts a further presentation in 1935 featuring 25 new landscapes and cityscapes.

Kokoschka is grateful for the offer from Zurich during a period “that knows nothing but to trample on modern art and betray it when it is expedient to do so” (letter to Hans Posse, 7 April 1935). He experiences increasing rejection and losses due to political developments in his homeland. The Nazis regard his expressive depictions of human beings as “degenerate”, and in 1937 they are removed from German art collections. But Kokoschka, who has been living in Prague since 1934, refuses to conform in any way.

In 1937, Wilhelm Wartmann writes that in little more than two decades, 270 works by Kokoschka have been shown in Zurich alone. But it will be another ten years before the “degenerate” artist himself is able to enter the country again, this time for the major 1947 retrospective in Basel and at the Kunsthaus Zürich. It shows many paintings that had been thought lost and is also a commercial success for Kokoschka. In summer, the NZZ publishes two samples of his storytelling: “The story of daughter Virginia” and “Childhood illness”.

After ten years spent in exile in London, with houses as far as the eye can see, on returning to Switzerland he once again paints “landscapes in the light and open air” (letter to Hans Maria Wingler, 21 October 1947). In Valais, he paints the unconventional portrait of his patron Werner Reinhart which is now in the Kunstmuseum Winterthur.

“Switzerland is now becoming ‘non-representational’ and abstract too, and museum directors here as elsewhere overvalue the rogue textile draughtsmen of our time to the detriment of classical, European painting”, Kokoschka writes in 1954 to the Zurich patron Emil Bührle.

A number of art enthusiasts from Zurich come to his aid: in 1952 the publishing house Rascher releases “Gestalten und Landschaften”, while in 1955, Walter Kern in Winterthur publishes what Kokoschka considers the perfectly designed “Thermopylae” portfolio and follows it up in the journal “Das Werk”.

In 1956, the publisher Atlantis releases a volume of Kokoschka’s tales entitled “Tracks in the Quicksand”, with a “beautiful love story” and “much to excite” (letter to Bettina A., 21 December 1956).

Letters in the literary estate reveal how keenly Kokoschka cultivated his patrons.

In December 1982, to mark the donation of the estate by Olda Kokoschka, the ZB Zürich opens the exhibition “Oskar Kokoschka – a painter’s travel notes”. The “Neue Zürcher Nachrichten” newspaper reports that sketches, photos, manuscripts, printed works and letters convey “an image of the private Kokoschka”. It also comments on his close connection to Zurich. Curated by Dr Günter Birkner, Head of the Music Department, the presentation attracts so much interest that it is extended until February 1983.

Music and connections played a role in the gift: back in 1976, Elisabeth Furtwängler had transferred to the ZB Zürich the papers of the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had died in 1954. The musician’s widow lives in Clarens, Vaud, and is a close friend of Olda Kokoschka.

100 years after Kokoschka’s first sojourn in Switzerland, the exhibition “Tracks in the quicksand − Oskar Kokoschka in a new light” takes place in Zurich. In association with the Fondation Oskar Kokoschka (FOK) in Vevey, the ZB Zürich offers new insights into the artist’s literary and pictorial oeuvre and his biography.

Curators Dr Régine Bonnefoit (FOK) and Ruth Häusler (ZB Manuscript Department) present many previously unknown documents from the holdings added to the estate in 2004. Their accompanying publication receives much praise from specialists.

Oskar Kokoschka is born on 1 March 1886, the second child of Gustav Kokoschka (1840–1923), a goldsmith from Prague, and Romana, née Loidl (1861–1934), in Pöchlarn, Lower Austria. He grows up in impoverished circumstances in Vienna with his younger siblings Berta (1889–1960) and Bohuslav (1892–1976).

There, he attends state schools and initially entertains ideas of becoming a chemist. According to Bohuslav Kokoschka, his mother “pushes him to become an artist rather than a civil servant”; receiving early encouragement from sponsors, however, he takes up painting.

In 1904, the drawing teacher Johann Schober arranges a scholarship for his pupil to attend the Arts and Crafts School in Vienna (now the University of Applied Arts). In summer 1906, he produces his first portraits in oils and the “Lassinger Madonna”.

In 1907, as a staff member of the Wiener Werkstätte, the art student Kokoschka illustrates his own poem “The Dreaming Youths” with fairytale colour lithographs.

As both a draughtsman and a playwright, his work is provocative. The première of his one-act play “Murderer, Hope of Women” in July 1909 earns him a reputation as an “angry young man” and “enfant terrible”. He joins the literary circle of Karl Kraus and Peter Altenberg.

Impressed by van Gogh, he seeks out allusive means of expression and emotive ways of applying paint. As well as using a brush to produce his portraits, he also works them with his hands and fingernails, an unconventional method that serves to express the subject’s “inner face”.

Following his first visit to Switzerland in early 1910, Kokoschka moves temporarily to Berlin and works as an editor of Herwarth Walden’s Expressionist art journal “Sturm”. Berlin gallerist Paul Cassirer stages a first exhibition of his work, including oil paintings, illustrations and nude drawings.

By January 1911, Kokoschka is ready to return to Vienna, where he paints a series of religious images. With the support of friends and patrons, he works as a painter, illustrator, dramatist and drawing teacher, and attracts international attention.

In 1914, Kokoschka paints a masterpiece: the dramatically animated double portrait “Bride of the Wind”, now in the Kunstmuseum Basel. It shows him with his lover Alma Mahler. When the musician’s widow puts an end to their tempestuous relationship, Kokoschka volunteers for military service in the 15th Regiment of Royal and Imperial Dragoons.

He is seriously wounded twice, in Galicia and Ukraine. From that moment on, as he writes in the monograph “Kokoschka – Beziehungen zur Schweiz”, he wishes “no longer to be in thrall to any ideologies, national hegemonies or religious orientations”.

The process of spiritual and physical recovery takes a long time. While recovering in the sanatorium at the Weisser Hirsch near Dresden, Kokoschka joins the theatrical circle of Käthe Richter and Walter Hasenclever. A contract with the art dealer Paul Cassirer ensures his financial security until 1930.

Researchers continue to be fascinated by the fact that, in 1918, Kokoschka commissioned the puppet maker Hermine Moos to produce a life-size puppet of Alma Mahler, which was to serve him as both company and model. Art experts have identified in his figural images signs of mental instability, existential angst and isolation.

In 1919, he is appointed professor of art at the Dresden Academy. Paintings of the view from his studio window over Dresden’s new town reveal, according to art historian Norbert Werner, a new “impasto colour fabric structure”. He also creates lithographs and watercolours.

Kokoschka achieves recognition as a painter and author of stage works. His plays “Murderer, Hope of Women” (Paul Hindemith, 1921) and “Orpheus and Eurydice” (Ernst Krenek, 1926) are successfully performed as opera.

In 1924, Kokoschka develops an urge to travel. He takes leave from work and embarks on extended journeys through Europe as well as the Near East and North Africa. He sends postcards almost every day, updating friends and family about his pictures and route, and reporting on his many and varied impressions of the places he visits – impressions that are reflected directly in his painting.

He creates atmospheric cityscapes of Venice, Avignon, London, Lyon, Jerusalem, Istanbul and finally Vienna. They are both his interpretation and his imagination of those places. The Kunsthaus Zürich also exhibits the new series of works in 1935.

Although, by this time, Kokoschka is one of the most prominent painters in Europe, his financial situation deteriorates in the wake of the Great Depression.

Under political pressure in Germany and Austria, in 1934 Kokoschka moves to Prague, where his sister Berta Patocka lives and his ancestors had previously. It is here that he meets the woman who is to become his wife: Oldriska Aloisie Palkovska (1915–2004). She holds a doctorate in law.

Kokoschka expounds his critical views of contemporary events. He develops ideas about education reform and writes the drama “Comenius”.

The touring exhibition entitled “Degenerate Art” initiated by Reichsminister Goebbels in 1937, holds Kokoschka’s works up to ridicule. In July, 417 of his pictures are seized from German collections. Nine of them are auctioned in 1939 in Lucerne, including “The Bride of the Wind”.

Following the annexation of Austria and the mobilisation in Czechoslovakia, Kokoschka and Olda Palkovska flee to London in October 1938. “OK has made some beautiful pictures [...], but of course all our future plans collapsed with war and market is practically none now”, she writes to her parents in 1939 from the fishing village of Polperro. In Cornwall and Scotland, Kokoschka produces coloured pencil drawings and lyrical watercolours.

On 15 May 1941, the couple marry in an air-raid shelter in London.

During the war, Kokoschka supports the Allied cause by writing essays, giving speeches and painting allegorical pictures such as “What We Are Fighting For”. He is a co-founder and the president of the anti-fascist Free German League of Culture, and supports aid organisations. Having become Czech citizens in 1938, in 1947 the Kokoschkas exchange this for British citizenship.

It is not until after the Second World War that commissions for portraits from Oskar Kokoschka pick up again. In 1947, he continues his travels around the European continent and also returns to Switzerland. Exhibitions and teaching posts take him back to the US in 1948.

In 1950, he creates his biggest picture in London: the three-part ceiling painting with Baroque echoes entitled “The Prometheus Triptych” measures 2.39 metres by 8.17 metres and breaks “deliberately all the taboos [...] that apply today internationally”.

After visiting the major Munch exhibition in Zurich in 1952, Kokoschka writes for the NZZ newspaper about the Norwegian artist’s symbolic expressionism – and takes a side-swipe at “fashionable non-representational art”.

Oskar Kokoschka spends the last 27 years of his life in Villeneuve, Vaud. He travels widely, studies Antiquity, Greece, theatre and opera, and finds modern ways of expressing his own experiences and contemporary messages. He argues forcefully for a more humane Europe.

In 1953, along with the art dealer Friedrich Welz, he sets up the international summer academy in Salzburg, where he heads the “School of Seeing” until 1963. In 1955, he launches a second “School of Seeing” in Sion.

In 1974, showered with honours and commissions, he becomes an Austrian citizen once again. He gives up drawing at the end of 1976 due to his failing eyesight. On 22 February 1980, he dies in Montreux Hospital.