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Oskar Kokoschka"Wer Liefert" Oskar Kokoschka, Satirical Expressionist Caricature, Red on White circa 1917
circa 1917
$22,000
£16,820.33
€19,271.72
CA$31,031.15
A$33,785.01
CHF 18,040.12
MX$407,838.02
NOK 226,796.59
SEK 210,947.22
DKK 143,950.36
About the Item
Oskar Kokoschka
Wer Liefert, circa 1917
Sanguine on paper
8 1/2 x 10 1/4 inches
Throughout his career, Kokoschka demonstrated a thirst for independence and refrained from associating himself with artistic movements. If the artist accepted one epithet to describe himself, it was that of expressionist. “I am an expressionist because I do not know how to do anything other than express life.” His commitment to his art is reflected in each of his works and places him as an essential witness to his time and its transformations.
A radical artist from the start, he became a target of the Nazis, who considered him a representative of “degenerate art.” He fought against fascism with his work, becoming an influential figure for European reconciliation after World War II and actively participating in the cultural reconstruction of a devastated continent.
When Kokoschka was three years old, his father went bankrupt in a financial crash. The family was forced to move to Vienna, where his father worked as a traveling salesman and his mother cared for the children on limited means. Tragedy entered the artist’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 windows and Baroque frescoes of the Church of the Piarist Order, where he sang in the choir.
At age 18 Kokoschka won a scholarship to the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna. Soon he became an assistant teacher there, giving lessons at night and studying during the day. By 1907 he had also become a member of the Vienna Crafts Studio, which supplied him with commissions until 1909. At the School of Arts and Crafts he learned drawing, lithography, bookbinding, and other crafts. Kokoschka 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 field of the decorative arts.
From the beginning Kokoschka’s primary artistic interest was the human figure; this interest was perhaps rooted in his deep concern for humanity, which transcended even his concern for art. He tried to find practical means to pursue this interest. In his night classes he hired the thin, muscular children of acrobats as models, teaching his pupils to make quick sketches. 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 create monumental paintings. Kokoschka taught himself to paint in oils and executed some canvases, but economic necessity forced him to spend most of his time on decorative work, and the general artistic milieu around him continued to be unsupportive of 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.
In 1937 the Nazis removed all of Kokoschka’s works from German museums and collections, denouncing them 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 fact that a great Kokoschka exhibition was held in Vienna that year did not allay his fears. After the Munich agreement between the English prime minister Neville Chamberlain and Hitler in 1938, Kokoschka fled to London with Olda Palkovska.
Kokoschka’s financial situation in London was so desperate that he was forced to paint mainly in watercolor, a less-expensive medium than oil. He completed a number of large canvases on antiwar themes, however. These works express his distress at the sufferings of humanity, yet are free from narrow ideological considerations; the series is an indictment of all the powers, not just the fascist ones, that had caused suffering in World War II. In 1942 Kokoschka also painted a portrait of the Russian ambassador to London, Ivan Maysky, and donated the fee for the painting to the Red Cross for the care of German and Russian soldiers wounded in the Battle of Stalingrad. He became a British subject in 1947.
After the war, beginning with a large exhibition in Vienna in 1947, Kokoschka was honored with a series of exhibitions of his work in Zürich, London, Venice, and elsewhere throughout Europe and in the United States, and he became financially secure for the first time. He continued to paint portraits and landscapes. In 1950 he created his first major mythological compositions, the three paintings of the Prometheus Saga.
In 1953 Kokoschka moved to Switzerland and established an annual seminar called Schule des Sehens (“School of Seeing”) at the International Summer Academy for Visual Arts in Salzburg, Austria. He also completed a second mythological trilogy, Thermopylae (1954). In the 1950s Kokoschka designed tapestries and theatrical scenery and worked increasingly in lithography. He also continued his political art; he designed two poignant posters protesting the effects of the Spanish Civil War and World War II on the children of Europe (1937, 1945), and a poster for Hungarian relief showing a stricken mother and a dead child (1956).
- Creator:Oskar Kokoschka (1880 - 1980, Austrian)
- Creation Year:circa 1917
- Dimensions:Height: 16.5 in (41.91 cm)Width: 18.25 in (46.36 cm)
- More Editions Sizes:Unique workPrice: $22,000
- Medium:
- Movement Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:New York, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU1841216925252
Oskar Kokoschka
Oskar Kokoschka (1 March 1886 – 22 February 1980) was an Austrian artist, poet and playwright best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes. He was second child to Gustav Josef Kokoschka, a Czech goldsmith, and Maria Romana Kokoschka (née Loidl). His older brother died in infancy in 1887; he had a sister, Berta (born in 1889) and a brother, Bohuslav (born in 1892). Oskar had a strong belief in omens, spurred by a story of a fire breaking out in Pöchlarn shortly after his mother gave birth to him. Kokoschka’s life was not easy mainly due to a lack of financial help from his father. They constantly moved into smaller flats, farther and farther from the thriving center of the town. Concluding that his father was inadequate, Kokoschka drew closer to his mother. Among Kokoschka’s early works were gesture drawings of children, which portrayed them as awkward and corpse-like. Kokoschka had no formal training in painting and so approached the medium without regard to the “traditional” or “correct” way to paint. The teachers at Kunstgewerbeschule helped Kokoschka gain opportunities through the Wiener Werkstätte or Viennese Workshops. Kokoschka’s first commissions were postcards and drawings for children. Kokoschka said that it gave him “the basis of [his] artistic training”.[1] His early career was marked by portraits of Viennese celebrities, painted in a nervously animated style. He volunteered for service as a cavalryman in the Austrian army in World War I, and in 1915 was seriously 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.
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