Kokoschka, Oskar (ôs`kär kōkôsh`kä), 1886–1980, Austrian expressionist painter and writer. After teaching at the art academy in Dresden (1920–24), Kokoschka traveled extensively in Europe and N Africa. In 1937 his works were removed from German galleries by the Nazis, who considered his work degenerate. He moved to London in 1938 and after World War II lived in Switzerland and established an international summer school in Salzburg.

Kokoschka was influenced by the elegant work of Klimt, Klimt, Gustav (gs`täf klĭmt), 1862–1918, Austrian painter.
..... Click the link for more information. but soon developed his own distinctive expressionist style (see expressionism expressionism, term used to describe works of art and literature in which the representation of reality is distorted to communicate an inner vision. The expressionist transforms nature rather than imitates it.
..... Click the link for more information. ). His early portraits (c.1909–14) emphasize psychological insight and tension (e.g., the portrait of Hans Tietze and his wife, 1909; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City). The same restless, energetic draftsmanship is characteristic of his expressionist landscapes and his striking posters and lithographs. His landscapes include Jerusalem (Detroit Inst. of Arts) and View of Prague (Phillips Memorial Gall., Washington, D.C.).

Bibliography

See his volume of watercolors, drawings, and writings (1962); reproductions of his work, comp. by B. Bultmann (1961), L. Goldscheider (1963), E. G. Rathenau (1970), and J. Tomeš (1972); biography by E. Hoffmann (1947).

Kokoschka, Oskar

(born March 1, 1886, Pöchlarn, Austria—died Feb. 22, 1980, Villeneuve, Switz.) Austrian painter and writer. He studied and taught at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts but was dissatisfied because the school omitted study of the human figure, his primary artistic interest. His early paintings were rendered in delicate, agitated lines and relatively naturalistic colours. After c. 1912 he became a leading exponent of Expressionism; his portraits came to be painted with increasingly broader strokes of more varied colour and heavier outlines. While recovering from a wound received in World War I, he wrote, produced, and staged three plays; his Orpheus and Eurydice (1918) became an opera by Ernst Krenek (1926). The landscapes he produced during 10 years of teaching and travel mark the second peak of his career. Shortly before World War II he fled to London, where his paintings became increasingly political and antifascist. He continued his political art after moving to Switzerland in 1953.