Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.


Oskar Kokoschka artist

Oskar Kokoschka was born in Pöchlarn, Austria-Hungary (now Austria), in 1886 and studied at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts), becoming in 1907 an associate of the Wiener Werkstätte design workshops. He went on to become Austria's most celebrated Expressionist painter, but after his political views brought him into opposition with the Nazi regime, he fled first to Czechoslovakia in 1934, then to England in 1938, where he was active within the émigré network and produced an important series of political works. Although naturalised in 1947, he spent his final years in Villeneuve, Switzerland, where he moved in 1953; a major retrospective was held in London at the Tate in 1962.

Born: 1886 Pöchlarn, Austria-Hungary (now Austria)

Died: 1980 Montreux, Switzerland

Year of Migration to the UK: 1938


Biography

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 in 1907 became an associate of the Wiener Werkstätte design workshops, which published his first book of poetry the following year. In 1908 he exhibited at the first Vienna Kunstschau, attracting the attention of leading painter Gustav Klimt; the architect Adolf Loos became his most vigorous supporter. In this early period, Kokoschka wrote plays that are considered among the first examples of expressionist drama. In 1910 his first solo show was held at the Galerie Paul Cassirer, Berlin, and he also contributed to Herwarth Walden’s periodical Der Sturm. In 1915, during the First World War, he volunteered to serve on the eastern front and was (twice) seriously wounded. Still recuperating in 1917, he settled in Dresden; in 1918, Paul Westheim published a comprehensive monograph on the artist, and in 1919 Kokoschka accepted a professorship at the Akademie. He travelled extensively during the 1920s and 1930s in Europe (including London in 1925 and 1926), North Africa, and the Middle East, returning to Vienna in 1931 where his defence of the painter Max Liebermann brought him into opposition with the Nazi regime. When violent political turmoil erupted in Vienna in 1934, Kokoschka accepted a commission to paint a portrait of the president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš G. Masaryk, and moved to Prague. From 1935 onwards he wrote essays and gave speeches on behalf of the Union für Recht und Freiheit (Union for Rights and Freedom), an organisation that mobilised opposition to the destruction of culture and violation of human rights and in 1936 he attended the Brussels peace congress as a member of the Czechoslovak delegation. The following year, he lent his name to the Oskar-Kokoschka-Bund, a new group founded by expatriate artists who rejected the Nazis’ artistic ideals. Eight of Kokoschka's paintings were included in the Nazis' 'degenerate art' exhibition of 1937 including his Self-Portrait as 'Degenerate' Artist, the title capturing his spirit of defiance. In July 1938, 19 of his works were included in the important 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 Prague for England, settling initially in London. Ironically, despite his European profile, Kokoschka was not yet well-known upon his arrival in Britain (his 1928 solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, London had 'passed almost unnoticed' (Hoffmann, 1948, p. 221); the couple moved to Cornwall the following August, befriending German émigré sculptor Uli Nimptsch, and visited by one of Kokoschka's former pupils, Hilde Goldschmidt; on their return they settled among the North London émigré community, marrying in 1941. Through German-Jewish émigré painter Fred Uhlman, who was married to Diana Croft (the eldest daughter of the Conservative MP Henry Page Croft), Kokoschka was commissioned in 1938-39 to paint portraits of Michael (National Trust, Croft Castle) and Posy Croft (National Galleries of Scotland). In 1942-43, he painted his most important London portrait of the Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky (Tate).

Politicised by his enforced exile, Kokoschka continued to be a vocal anti-Nazi, active within émigré organisations, particularly the Freien Deutschen Kulturbund (Free German League of Culture or FGLC), exhibiting in the First Group Exhibition of German Austrian Czechoslovakian Painters and Sculptors at the Wertheim Gallery in 1939. He served as Honorary President from 1941, advocating for Jewish emigrants and political enemies of the Nazis held in internment (including Ludwig Meidner) and also criticised the Allies' unassertive response to Hitler's policy of aggression in an important series of paintings including The Crab (1939-40, Tate). Kokoschka was greatly inspired by the Czechoslovak reformer and educator Johann Amos Comenius (1592-1670), who had emphasised the need for a humanist pedagogy and on 4 January 1943 he delivered an address at the opening of the exhibition The War as Seen by Children at the Cooling Galleries, New Bond Street, London. Kokoschka became a British citizen in 1947, regaining his Austrian citizenship in 1978. In 1947 the émigrée art historian Edith Hoffmann authored the first English-language Kokoschka monograph and he visited the United States. Three years later, he was commissioned by the Anglo-Austrian Count Antoine Seilern to create a monumental ceiling mural, known as the Prometheus Triptych, for his London house at 56 Princes Gate. It was later bequeathed to The Courtauld Institute of Art, promptingEvening Standard art critic Brian Sewell to call it 'the most important 20th century German [sic] painting in Britain'.

In 1953 the Kokoschkas moved to Villeneuve in Switzerland. Kokoschka’s collected writings were published in 1956, and he also became involved in stage design. In 1962, the critically acclaimed Kokoschka retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London also led to the resurgence of his graphic career with the first of several commissions from German-Jewish émigré Bernhard Baer, director of the Ganymed Press in London, for Kokoschka to create 16 original lithographs for a deluxe limited edition of Shakespeare’s King Lear, which Kokoschka afterwards called his 'most beloved work in print', disseminated through Marlborough Fine Art in London by Viennese-born gallerist Harry Fischer. In 1966 Prague-born émigré art historian J. P. Hodin published his Kokoschka biography (one of six pieces he wrote about the artist); Kokoschka's autobiography, My Life was published in 1974. Oskar Kokoschka died in Montreux, Switzerland on 22nd February 1980. Frank Whitford's English language biography (1986) coincided with a further Tate retrospective, with a lecture, 'Kokoschka in his time', delivered at on 2 July 1986 by E. H. Gombrich, followed by Susanne Keegan's The Eye of God: A Life of Oskar Kokoschka (1999) and most recently, an English-language edition of Rüdiger Görner's biography, Kokoschka: The Untimely Modernist (2020). Kokoschka's works are held in major collections in the UK including the Courtauld Gallery, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the Tate and the V&A, as well as many international collections.

Related books

  • Rüdiger Görner (Translators Debra Marmor and Herbert Danner), Oskar Kokoschka: The Untimely Modernist (London: Haus Publishing, 2020)
  • Sarah MacDougall, 'The Craftsman's Sympathy': Bernhard Baer, the Ganymed Press and Oskar Kokoschka's King Lear' in Marian Malet, Rachel Dickson, Sarah MacDougall and Anna Nyburg eds., Applied Arts in British Exile from 1933: Changing Visual and Material Culture (Leiden/Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2019), pp. 150-175
  • Peter Wakelin, Refuge and Renewal: Migration and British Art (Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2019)
  • Agnes Tieze ed., Oskar Kokoschka and the Prague Cultural Scene (Cologne: Wienand, 2015)
  • Beatrice von Bormann, Katharina Erling and Régine Bonnefoit, Oskar Kokoschka: Portraits of People and Animals (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2013)
  • Gemma Blackshaw and Edmund de Waal, Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 (London: National Gallery, 2013)
  • Bernadette Reinhold and Patrick Werkner eds., Oskar Kokoschka: ein Künstlerleben in Lichtbildern [An Artist's Life in Photographs] (Vienna: Ambra/V, 2013)
  • Emma Chambers, 'Refugees from Nazi Europe' in Lizzy Carey-Thomas ed, Migrations: Journeys into British Art (London, Tate Publishing, 2012), p. 63-64
  • Marian Malet, 'Oskar Kokoschka and the Freie Deutsche Kulturbund: The 'Friendly Alien' as Propagandist', in Anthony Grenville and Andrea Reiter, eds., 'I didn't want to float, I wanted to belong to something': Refugee Organizations in Britain 1933–1945, The Yearbook of the German and Austrian Research Centre, 10 (Leiden: Rodopi, 2008), pp. 49-66
  • Norbert Wolf, Oskar Kokoschka (Munich: Prestel, 2007)
  • Shulamith Behr and Marian Malet eds., Arts in Exile in Britain 1933–1945: Politics and Cultural Identity, The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, Vol. 6 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004)
  • Keith Holz, Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague, and London: Resistance and Acquiescence in a Democratic Public Sphere (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004)
  • Victor H. Miesel ed., Voices of German Expressionism (London: Tate Publishing, 2003)
  • Tobias G. Natter, Oskar Kokoschka: Early Portraits from Vienna and Berlin, 1909–1914 (New York: Neue Galerie, 2002)
  • Oskar Kokoschka, Plays and Poems (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2001)
  • Susanne Keegan, The Eye of God: A Life of Oskar Kokoschka (London: Bloomsbury, 1999)
  • Alfred Weidinger, Kokoschka and Alma Mahler (Munich: Prestel, 1996)
  • Alfred Weidinger, Oskar Kokoschka: Dreaming Boy, Enfant Terrible: Oskar Kokoschka at the Vienna School of Applied Arts (Oslo: Stenersen Museum, 1996)
  • Ernest Rathenau, Oskar Kokoschka Drawings, 1906–1965 (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1993)
  • E. H. Gombrich, Kokoschka in His Time: A Lecture Given at the Tate Gallery on 2 July 1986 (London: Tate Gallery, 1986)
  • Oskar Kokoschka: 1886–1980 (London: Tate Gallery, 1986)
  • Frank Whitford, Oskar Kokoschka: A Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986)
  • Henry I Schvey, Oskar Kokoschka, The Painter as Playwright (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982)
  • Oskar Kokoschka, My Life (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974)
  • Jan Marius Tomeš, Oskar Kokoschka: London Views, British Landscapes (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972)
  • Oskar Kokoshka, Kokoshka: London from the River Thames (New York: Marborough-Gerson Gallery, 1967)
  • J. P. Hodin, Oskar Kokoschka: the Artist and his Time (London: Cory, 1966)
  • Oskar Kokoschka, A Sea Ringed with Visions (London: Thames & Hudson, 1962)
  • Kokoschka: A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings, Lithographs, Stage Designs and Books (London: The Arts Council, 1962)
  • Bernhard Bultmann, Oskar Kokoschka (London: Thames and Hudson, 1961)
  • Edith Hoffmann, Kokoschka, Life and Work (With Two Essays by Kokoschka and a Foreword by Herbert Read) (London: Faber & Faber, 1947)

Public collections

Related organisations

  • Austrian Centre (founder member)
  • Free German League of Culture (founder member, president from 1941)
  • School of Applied Arts, Vienna (student)

Related web links

Selected exhibitions

  • Oskar Kokoschka: Expressionist, Migrant, European – A Retrospective, Leopold Museum, Vienna (2019)
  • Oskar Kokoschka. Arcadia of Dreams, Espace Kokoschka, Musée Jenisch, Vevey (2019)
  • Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Oskar Kokoschka, Kirchner Museum, Davos (2017)
  • Oskar Kokoschka: Eine Retrospektive, Kunsthaus Zürich (2018)
  • Oskar Kokoschka and the Prague Cultural Scene, The National Gallery, Prague (2015)
  • Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900, National Gallery (2013)
  • Oskar Kokoschka: 1886–1980, Tate (1986)
  • Oskar Kokoschka, Tate (1962)
  • First Group Exhibition of German Austrian Czechoslovakian Painters and Sculptors, Wertheim Gallery, London (1939)
  • Twentieth Century German Art, New Burlington Galleries, London (1938)
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Publications related to [Oskar Kokoschka] in the Ben Uri Library