(1886-1980)

As a student years Kokoscbka was strongly influenced by Gustav Klimt's Art Nouveau symbolism. But a violent Expressionist impetus was revealed in two plays he wrote that scandalized Vienna in 1909, sending him off first to Switzerland and then to Germany, where Herwarth Walden, the avant-garde writer and art dealer, welcomed him to the Sturm group of artists and poets. Kokoscbka's portraits were exceptionally vivid, capturing the psychological character of his sitters. In later years Kokoscbka painted landscapes and views of cities in a more tender but still Expressionist manner.

KOKOSCHKA'S THOUGHTA ON ART

"How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.'
[19361

"Man know thyself," the device of ancient Greek philosophy, has guided the European whenever he proved himself mature enough to realize that this, the power of reasoning, was all he had received from the hands of the gods. The loss of free will to determine our own fate has led us into a dead end where we have no choice. We have to fit ourselves into the artificial master-plan of mechanical society in order to escape bellum omnium contra omnes or the Third Total War." [1947]

"1 myself see no cause to retrace my steps. I shall not weary of testifying by the means given to me by nature and expressed in my art, in which only vision is fundamental, not theories. I consider myself responsible, not to society, which dictates fashion and taste suited to its environment and itsperiod, but to youth, to the coming generations, which are left stranded in a blitzed world, unaware of the soul trembling in awe before the mystery of life. I dread the future, when the growth of the inner life will be more and more hampered by a too speedy adaption to a mechanically conceived environment, when all human industry is to be directed to fit in with the blue prints.... For the growth of the inner life can never be brought into any scientific formula, whatever the technician and the scientist of the soul may try. The life of the soul is expressed by man in his art.... The mystery of the soul is like that of a closed door. When you open it, you see something which was not there before." [19481

"The difference between experience and all desiccated theory is that, so to speak, the this-worldly embraces the other-worldly: A moment, in the Beyond, reappears as infinity. The torpor of human impulses is a necessary back ground to the divine shaft of light, as silence is broken by a cry or asdull habit is swept away by the unexpected and unpredicted. " [19531

"Let us be clear to begin with that I am content with the world as it is and must be, and would not change it for the moon. Even a successful moon landing would not, I feel sure, make much difference to our world. Only experience can shake a man out of his lethargy, as it shows that life generally turns out contrary to plan. " [1961]

INTRODUCTION     WHAT ART IS    SPIRIT OF ART    REFLECTIONS BY ARTISTS    MY WORKS OF ART