Word: kokoschka
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Neither as chic as Paris nor as intriguingly edgy as Budapest, the Vienna of today is a cozy and polished metropolis. But at the beginning of the 20th century, Vienna was chockablock with giants of the age: Freud and Wittgenstein, Mahler, Berg and Schoenberg, Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Hoffmann, Wagner and Loos -- as well as the young Adolf Hitler, a desperate artist-architect manque. Old cultural dogmas had been discredited, new doctrines not yet entrenched. Imminence was all. Artists and intellectuals all over Europe shared a sense of being on the very cusp -- between a smug century...
Just as the architects' and designers' pioneering zeal seemed to give out, the enfants terribles Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka (see following story) had their first shows of paintings in Vienna. Their intense, expressionist works did not flirt, like Klimt's gilded sultanic pictures, with bourgeois prettiness and what the catalog calls "proto-psychedelic sweetness." Schiele, who died young (in 1918, along with Moser, Wagner and Klimt), has been the subject of more passionate popularity than Kokoschka over the years: his images were the more earnestly pained and ugly. As Varnadoe writes, Viennese arts had lost their capacity for compromise...
...initials "OK," like a brusque mark of approval, are scrawled in the corners of a few of the best paintings of our century. They belonged to Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), the visionary Austrian painter whose career spanned seven decades and not a few places of exile. Born in the world of the Emperor Franz Josef, he died in that of Reagan and Thatcher, just before the expressionist revival of the '80s took hold. Recent years have seen major shows of such expressionist masters as Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann, and now the 100th anniversary of O.K.'s birth is marked...
...sense of culture they try to construct withers in the red glare of National Socialism. After 1933 their story becomes a lugubrious tale of giants in exile (Oskar Kokoschka, Kurt Schwitters, Max Beckmann), of ruined hope, lopped lives and rampant state philistinism. By 1945 there is no life left in the expressionist impulse, at least in Germany; it can only be reborn in America as abstraction, and then re-exported to exhausted Europe. By 1955 figurative expressionism is a dodo--shot by Hitler, eaten by art history, its bones a museum specimen. Thus spake, until lately, the scenario...
...major figures in prewar expressionism--Kirchner, Kokoschka, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff --are here at full stretch, with works that have rarely or never been seen outside Germany. It would be hard, for instance, to find a better epitome of the expressionist vision of relationships between humans and nature than Kirchner's Striding into the Sea, 1912, with its naked lovers swept up in a kind of decorative pantheism, at one with the flouncing breakers and sharply writhing sand dunes of the Baltic shore...