Oskar Kokoschka
The psychologist of Viennese Expressionism.
Oskar Kokoschka painted portraits that got under his sitters' skin. His The Bride of the Wind depicts his love for Alma Mahler.
Oskar Kokoschka was born in 1886 in Pöchlarn on the Danube and grew up in Vienna. He studied at the School of Arts and Crafts there, and he was already attracting attention at the great Kunstschau exhibition of 1908. The following year his play Murderer, the Hope of Women caused a scandal. The architect Adolf Loos became an early patron and found him portrait commissions among Vienna's intellectuals.
The portraits were his breakthrough. Kokoschka did not want to depict the surface but to capture the sitter's inner life, and many clients did not recognise themselves. Faces and hands are painted with nervous, scratched strokes, and the paint can be both thin and raw. Together with Egon Schiele, he is regarded as the leading figure of Austrian Expressionism.
Between 1912 and 1914 he had a stormy affair with Alma Mahler, widow of the composer Gustav Mahler. It is depicted in The Bride of the Wind of 1913–14, in which the couple lie in a swirling, blue-green landscape. The painting is now in the Kunstmuseum Basel. When Alma left him, he enlisted in the First World War and was badly wounded. Afterwards he had a doll made in her likeness, an episode that has become part of his legend.
From 1919 to 1923 he was a professor at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, and he then travelled for long periods in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, painting vividly coloured cityscapes. The Nazis branded his art “degenerate”. He fled to Prague in 1934 and on to London in 1938, where he later became a British citizen. He answered the Nazis with Self-Portrait of a “Degenerate Artist” of 1937.
From 1953 he lived in Villeneuve on Lake Geneva. That same year he founded a summer school in Salzburg which he called the School of Seeing, where he taught people to see and draw freely. He died in Montreux in 1980, aged 93. Kokoschka stands as one of the great portrait painters of the 20th century and an example of how Expressionism made inner life the true subject of the picture.