Vienna secession kokoshka professional#

His autobiography A Sea Ringed with Visionshas been categorized as “representative of the psychedelic thrust of late Romanticism,” while two dramatic works Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen and Orpheus und Eurydikewere respectively characterized as “the first Expressionist drama” and a classic collaboration with Ernst Krenek, who transformed the latter into an opera after being approached to score incidental music for the short play.įollowing service in the First World War and flight from Nazis surrounding the Second, Kokoschka settled in Switzerland in 1947, where he lived out the remainder of his life. While none will be directly presented in coordination with this exhibition, Kokoschka’s language-oriented works were met with some enthusiasm. The young Kokoschka nurtured his self-expression in several media, including a host of literary pursuits.

Vienna secession kokoshka professional#

Many of the drawings that supplement the portraits presented by the Neue Galerie were prepared on commission from the Werkstätte, constituting a second glance at the ways in which Kokoschka’s artistic formation is closely tied to “the constraints of visual art as a professional endeavor,” orin other wordsto portraiture. Throughout his early career and despite misgivings surrounding his ostensible association with the German Expressionists, Kokoschka remained closely tied to the Wiener Werkstättean applied-arts-focused community of visual artists that evolved from the Vienna Secession. In particular, critics of the day praised Kokoschka for having a unique mode of “seeing” that colored “a style of subtle departures from strict representation” in which “the subjects of his portraits are illuminated from within, rather than from an exterior light source… his sitters.” This characterization describes one of the many formal explorations taken up by the young Kokoschka and captured in his portraits, which have also been described as pioneering “a reevaluation of traditional vanishing-point depth perception that anticipated the flattened forms which would follow quickly in modern movements such as Cubism and Abstract Expressionism.” Kokoschka’s technical skills allowed him to engage in a sitting without preparatory studies, fixing his subjects on the canvas during their first sessions. In discussing the aesthetics of Kokoschka’s relationship to his contemporaries, art historians have made note of Kokoschka’s individuality among German Expressionists by citing his early experiments with oil paints in the setting of portraiture. Kokoschka won early recognition in 1908 at the Vienna Kunstschau, where he was described by Gustav Klimtthen president of the Vienna Secession artists’ unionas “the outstanding talent among the younger generation.” Kokoschka’s primary artistic development took place during the German Expressionism movement of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries andeven as Kokoschka distanced himself from the widely-regarded school of artistsscholars and critics continue to associate him with their work today, citing congruency in both style and choice of subject matter. The exhibition collects a wide swath of oil paintings and drawings, taken principally from Kokoschka’s portrait oeuvre and spanning a lifelong career that began in the early 1900s and extended to the artist’s death. From July 16th through October 5th, the Neue Galerie in New York City will present an extensive retrospective of the works of 20th Century Austrian painter, poet, and playwright Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980).