Oskar Kokoschka opens at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Wolfsburg - The Kunstmuseum is celebrating its 20th birthday.
It is marking the occasion with the exhibition Oskar Kokoschka. Humanist and Rebel, which is primarily devoted to the portraits by this exquisite modern artist.
The golden thread through the exhibition is Kokoschka himself, a protagonist of Viennese modernism (born 1886 in Pöchlarn near Vienna, died 1980 in Montreux, Swit- zerland).
His paintings reveal the people he knew and his view of humanity and society, this way he is providing a unique personal perspective of the 20th century and its major occurrences.
Kokoschka’s portraits reveal him to be a true humanist and rebel. With his distinctive expressive painting style and dramatic use of brushstrokes he was furthermore a decisive influence on the so-called Neue Wilde of the 1980s.
When the young Oskar Kokoschka entered the stage of art in Vienna with his passionately restless works, he encountered the milieu of Viennese modernism.
As a painter, printmaker and author Oskar Kokoschka advanced not only to become one of the most prominent proponents of Viennese modernism, but also one of the most idiosyncratic advocates of Expressionism.
The artist is focusing on the spirit of a new beginning and the avant-garde influenced by such personalities as Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler and Arthur Schnitzler exuded throughout Vienna.
Over 400 of his works were confiscated from German museums by the National Socialists and were destroyed in parts. Kokoschka himself, whose work was denounced at the Munich Entartete Kunst exhibition, was declared “Art Enemy # 1”.
In 1953 Kokoschka moved with his wife Olda, who he married in London in 1941, to Villeneuve, Switzerland.
The exhibition concludes with the artist’s view of himself, the group of self-portraits produced between 1906 and 1972: «And when I made self-portraits… it was only to ascertain: What is the human being really? The human being is not merely the surface, not that part that can be photographed».
