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The Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) achieved global fame with his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes. In this first English-language biography, Rüdiger Görner depicts the artist in all his fascinating and contradictory complexity. He traces Kokoschka’s path from bête noire of the bourgeoisie and “hunger artist” who had to flee the Nazis to a wealthy and cosmopolitan political and critical artist who played a significant role in shaping the European art scene of the twentieth century and whose relevance is undiminished to this day. In Kokoschka: A Life in Art, Görner emphasizes the artist’s versatility. Kokoschka, although best known for his expressionistic portraits and landscapes, was more than a mere visual artist: his achievements as a playwright, essayist, and poet bear witness to a remarkable literary talent. Music, too, played a central role in his work, and a passion for teaching led him to establish in 1953 the School of Seeing, an unconventional art school intended to revive humanist ideals in the horrific aftermath of war. This biography shows brilliantly how all the pieces of Kokoschka’s disparate interests and achievements cohered in the richly creative life of a singular artist.

It was during this period that he made his first professional works, charming postcards and fans for the influential Wiener Werkstatte. These decorative works soon gave way to his more mature style, characterized by a masterly command of draughtsmanship and an often-violent subject matter that plumbs the depths of the human psyche, instinct, and myth. This volume includes a broad selection of works from the years when Kokoschka was at the height of his artistic powers, creating deeply charged portraits, figure studies, and dramatic illustrations based on the literary works he authored.

Oskar Kokoschka ((1886-1980) is one of Austria’s finest and most revered Expressionist artists. His paintings are renowned and admired for their vivid color and restless energy. This significant book focuses on the early portraits that Kokoschka painted in Vienna and Berlin on the eve of World War I. Perhaps the best known and most highly esteemed of all his works, these portraits are wonderful examples of Kokoschka’s use of exaggeration and distortion of color to convey deep emotion and psychological tension. They also present a fascinating look at many of the important intellectual figures of the era, for their subjects include Peter Altenberg, Adolf Loos, Alma Mahler, and Kokoschka himself (in his Self Portrait as Knight Errant). This beautifully illustrated book includes not only these arresting oil portraits but also some of Kokoschka’s drawings of the same sitters and a selection of the postcards, fans, and posters he made for the Wiener Werkstätte in the period before the portraits were completed, all of which shed light on his early development. There are also discussions by eminent authorities on the culture and history of Vienna and Berlin in the prewar period; Kokoschka’s shift from Art Nouveau to Expressionism; his place within the German and Austrian Expressionist movements; his reception in the United States; and much more.

Vienna: Art and Design: Klimt, Schiele, Hoffmann, Loos is a stylish and timeless publication that highlights this extraordinary and provocative period when a unique generation of artistic and intellectual geniuses laid the foundations for life in the twentieth century. Beginning in 1897 artists such as Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, Adolf Loos and Egon Schiele transformed Vienna into a dynamic, vibrant metropolis at the forefront of groundbreaking modernism.

Oskar Kokoschka first met Alma Mahler on April 12, 1912, exactly eleven months after the death of her husband - the composer Gustav Mahler. Three days later, the much younger Kokoschka proposed to her in a passionate letter and they embarked on a stormy relationship which was to last only three years. This short and passionate affair greatly influenced his work. Kokoschka, born in Austria in 1886, was both an artist and writer. He led a turbulent life and travelled extensively, before settling in England where he became a British Subject in 1947. He died in Switzerland in 1980, just days before his 94th birthday. Kokoschka's work was greatly influenced by Gustav Klimt and medieval artists such as Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Durer, painting in a distinctive Expressionist style in his early career. Kokoschka and Alma Mahler explores their passionate relationship, illustrating and discussing the 20 paintings, 70 drawings and prints, and 7 fans that bear witness to this incredibly intense and fateful relationship. His works reflect his love and overwhelming desire, the impressions gained from his travels, and the depths of his despair. The fascinating picture portrayed by the author includes hitherto unpublished material, in particular Alma Mahler's diary from 1912-1913.

The link between painting and music in the works of Oscar Kokoschka is explored in this original volume.

Primitivism versus modernity: the expressionist dilemma - Politics of primitivism - Brucke bathers: back to nature - Max Pechstein's visionary ideas - Emil Nolded.