Oskar Kokoschka
Category: Books,Arts & Photography
Oskar Kokoschka Details
Oskar Kokoschka (18861980) is, along with Francis Picabia and Pablo Picasso, one of a generation of artists who retained their allegiance to figurative painting after the Second World War, even as abstract art was consolidating its predominance. It is also thanks to them that non-representational painting and figurative art can now be practised side by side without partisan feuding. Artists of the present day acknowledge their debt to Kokoschka in particular. For Nancy Spero, Herbert Brandl and Denis Savary, his expressionistic style is an explicit or implicit source of inspiration. They value the gestural articulation of his brushwork, praise his open-minded, cosmopolitan attitudes or share the pacifism that, especially after the traumatic experiences of the First World War, runs like a thread through Kokoschkas work, life and legacy. Following his last major solo show in 1986, the Kunsthaus now sets out to acquaint a new generation of visitors with this artist, who died by Lake Geneva in 1980 and whose works are held in substantial numbers in both Vevey and Zurich The retrospective traces the motifs and motivations of a painter who felt at home in no fewer than five countries. It brings together 100 paintings and an equal number of works on paper, photographs and letters from all phases of his career. Two impressive triptychs The Prometheus Triptych (1950, Courtauld Gallery, London) and Thermopylae (1954, University of Hamburg) are the high point of Kokoschkas mature oeuvre, and of this retrospective.
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