Expressionism

Expressionism was an artistic movement that lasted from about 1905 to 1930. Expressionism started first in Germany. The name was given during an exhibition in Berlin in 1911. Expressionism meant personal subjectivism. Expressionist artists developed representations that expressed their deepest emotions.
For the Expressionists, pictures were supposed to show the emotions of the individual painter. For many German artists, Expressionism was also a movement of political protest against the dire conditions of the very poor in their country. The artists presented all the fears and anxieties of the period of just before World War I in their work. The movement also had important followers in Flanders (Constant Permeke, Gustave Van De Woestijne) and France (Georges Rouault). Many German painters were killed or wounded in World War I.

There existed in Germany various schools or groupings of artists that called themselves Expressionists.

Die Brücke:

"Die Brücke" was a movement of art founded in Dresden and that lasted from 1905 to 1913. The movement was officially dissolved in 1913 in Berlin, when the members broke up over writings of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner called "Chronik der Brücke".
Its painters and founders were Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Fritz Bleyl. Later Emil Nolde, Pechstein, and Otto Müller joined these.
These artists had a desire to act in a powerful way. They used bright colours and primitive forms. In 1911, the movement left Dresden for Berlin, and Max Pechstein joined it. Die Brücke was thus extended when Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein left the Berliner Sezession to build the Neue Sezession. Other painters were Kees van Dongen, Cuno Amiet, Franz Nölken and Otto Mueller.
The painters of "Die Brücke" painted with more intense emotions than Les Fauves. They also brought exaggerated deformations in their representation of the human form. They represented often humans, but for instance in sharp angular lines.

Der Sturm:

"Der Sturm" was the name of a gallery held by Herwarth Walden in Berlin, founded in 1910, where many exhibitions of Expressionists were given. Der Sturm was also a magazine. Oskar Kokoschka and Paula Modersohn-Becker are its best-known figures.

Der Blaue Reiter:

"Der Blaue Reiter" was a school in Munich, founded around Wassily Kandinsky in 1991, at the occasion of exhibitions in the Thannhauser Gallery organised by Kandinsky and Franz Marc. An almanac edited in 1912 was called "Der Blaue Reiter", and this is used as the founding date of the movement.
Members were Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, Alexei von Jawlensky, Paul Klee, Gabriele Münter and Marianne von Werefkin.

These painters gave dominance to colours like Les Fauves. They did not enter the brutal depiction of reality like "Die Brücke", but showed a softer expression of their inner spiritual world. They used warmer tones, more harmonious compositions. They explained their art in often very cerebral texts, like in Kandinsky’s writings on art. They appealed to the viewer’s soul in sensual feelings.

The painters of "Der Blaue Reiter" arrived by their research into the rules of harmony in art to abstract painting (Wassily Kandinsky). For Kandinsky, painting was purely an expression of inner sentiments and inner states of the artist, but that expression was based on formal elements that remained recognisable in the composition and the expression could be described.

Die Neue Sachlichkeit or Verismo:

This was a movement of Expressionism founded in 1920. The director of the Kunsthalle of Mannheim, Gustav F. Hartlaub, who organised the first exhibition of these artists in 1925, gave the name around 1923.
These painters introduced strict realism in figures and form again. They made strong, violent, realistic and shocking works. Their subjects were rude and tough scenes of middle-class city life, of brothel scenes, of cruel crimes, and of the war. The artists looked at this world with apparently an objective eye, but they aimed at very subjective impressions in the viewer hoping to interest the viewer in their social engagement.
There was a "left-wing" group in Berlin, Dresden and Karlsruhe (George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, Christian Schad and Otto Dix), who proposed a direct critic to the political and social situation of Europe, and foremost of Germany.
The "right-wing" artists of Munich were more romantic in their images (Alexander Kanoldt, Carlo Mense, and Georg Schrimpf).

The most representative painters were Max Beckmann, Georg Grosz, Christian Schad and Otto Dix.

Expressionism in general

Many Expressionists preferred colour to line, but many artists also limited their representation to coloured or heavy black lines. Lines certainly did not disappear but were often emphasised. A few hard, black lines could be very expressive. Expressionism favoured the irregular and the asymmetrical.

Expressionistic paintings show much vitality and freedom in forms and composition. These artists sought new means of expressions, new forms and arrangements of figures on the panels. They presented their subjects from unusual views, but they always presented them in realistic though often distorted and suggestive forms, though not in a broken or schematic way as the Cubists had done. Expressionists often deliberately broke symmetries and balance in order to call into the viewer emotions of distress and unease. But that technique really depended from artist to artist and important painters also sought balance and harmony of forms. Expressionism strives for the complex.

Expressionist painters used harsh, unrealistic colours in powerful brushstrokes, and strong dark outlines. Van Gogh may have been a precursor of the movement and he may have inspired many artists. The Expressionists used the expressive power of colours and the strong feelings that harsh colours inspired in viewers. This supported the tension in the paintings.

Expressionists painted scenes from real life. But they painted unusual scenes, unusual presentation. They avoided normality. They painted landscapes, portraits, and scenes of figures and also still-lives, and used even devotional subjects as long as strong emotions could be depicted. They later discovered that abstract pictures could serve at least as effectively as figurative art to express emotions in a powerful way

Expressionists did not much emphasise realistic representation of volume and space. They could distort realist perspective and they used this technique knowingly, as long as that served their aim to express emotions and induce strong emotional reactions in viewers. But they knew the techniques of linear and aerial perspective, and used it or amplified its effects when necessary for their objectives.

Expressionist painters were Max Beckman, Vincent Van Gogh, Erich Heckel, Alexei von Jawlensky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Marc, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Georges Rouault, Marc Chagall, Egon Schiele, Karl Schmidt-Rotluff, Chaim Soutine, Constant Permeke, Graham Sutherland, and many others.

Expressionism was a trend in the arts with various sub-movements of different evolution. There is thus a great difference in style between for instance the themes and ways of painting of the "Blaue Reiter" painters – who evolved much from the Fauvists -, and a painter like Oskar Kokoschka – who also used much colour -, and the painters of "Die Neue Sachlichkeit".
The ‘Blaue Reiter’ movement is an evolution from Impressionism and Fauvism, still much dedicated to special colour effects. Instead of giving a sweet impression of the wonders of light on landscapes and objects, Expressionists were concerned with their own emotions inspired by their subjects. Whereas the "Blaue Reiter" painters were still involved in colour, the artists of "Die Brücke" looked at the hard reality of the social differences in the classes of German society of just before the First World War. The "Brücke" painters sought their subjects in these tensions. Expressionism became the art form that epitomised first German and then European society from before and in World War I.

Aigues-Mortes (1925). Toledo (1925). Prague (1934). Annecy (1927). Market in Tunis (1928).

Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980). Aigues-Mortes, Toledo, Prague and Annecy in: The Jenisch Museum. Vevey (Switzerland). Market in Tunis in: The Courtauld Institute Galleries. London.

The town stretches wide and far before the eyes. It is a mass of lines and harsh colours. There is red and green and yellow, and very pronounced black lines. Walls, some of which loom high, dark and menacing, surround the town. The sombre lines are the work of men, and although the sky is of the purest blue, and although the light is yellow on the right, the black tones seem to push the town lower and deeper. This is Aigues-Mortes.

Aigues-Mortes is a medieval fortified town of Southern France. Here is the end and the beginning of Europe. The alluvial delta of the Rhône River in which lies the town, is the end of the large plains that start in the wideness of Russia and the Ukraine and then narrow from Germany to France, before stopping at the Pyrenees. All invasions from Asia to the Mediterranean crossed and followed these plains until water or mountains stopped them.

Aigues-Mortes stands as an enigma in the vast marshes of the Rhone delta, the Camargue. The salt water of the Mediterranean flows into the Rhône estuaries over the flat lands and recedes again. The salt settles quietly, and salt is the main riches of the town since old. Out of the plain, all around Aigues-Mortes, protecting the small houses, rise the fortified walls of the thirteenth century, miraculously preserved, with their round towers and massive gates.

Aigues-Mortes is where history survives. It was built from 1246 on by the French King Louis IX, who then ruled only over a part of contemporary France and not over the Southern Provence region. Royal France had no Mediterranean port of herself, so Aigues-Mortes was created to serve as a port and access to the Mediterranean. The town was built on order, and thus in a rational way. Its urban plan was to be a rectangle with streets in straight lines. It was an artificial town created by mind and purpose. A formidable tower commands the town, the Constance keep, main and last defence, a tower with walls more than six metres thick, a prison also, where political opponents to the Kings of France were isolated: the Templar knights, and later also Protestant Huguenots. Oskar Kokoschka painted Aigues-Mortes from the roof of that tower.

Aigues-Mortes was built for the crusades. In 1244 Jerusalem was lost to the Frankish Crusaders, taken by the Turks. Louis IX hired a Venetian and Genovese fleet of more than 1500 ships and left for Cyprus with an army of 35000 soldiers. He attacked the Turkish empire from out of Egypt, besieged the Egyptian fortified port Damiette, went for Cairo, but was defeated there and had to retreat to Damietta.
Louis IX and his army, decimated by typhus, had to surrender to the Sultan of Egypt in 1250. The Mamluk Turks, however, fought the Egyptian Sultan, and deposed him. They freed Louis IX for an enormous ransom, and for the return of their seaport Damietta. Louis IX left for Syria, where he remained for four years consolidating the Frankish kingdoms there. These Frankish kingdoms of the Near Orient are forgotten now, but yes, they existed, an anachronism in what was for Europeans an exotic part of the world. Of these kingdoms only the incredibly large fortified citadels like the "Crac des Chevaliers" remain. Louis IX returned to France in 1254. He embarked on a new crusade in 1270, the eighth crusade, but his expedition was deviated to Tunis where the King died the same year. Frankish Syria, founded in the eleventh century, 1098, consisting of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, the proud counties of Edessa and Tripoli, as well as the Principality of Antiochia would live on till the 1290s, then disappear, to be engulfed in the Muslim world again.

Oskar Kokoschka came to Aigues-Mortes in 1925. The town that had such a rich early history, in which he found the Romanticism of medieval times. The crusades fascinated him. Louis IX and Richard the Lionheart had been here. So many memories of history. Too many memories to grasp, they turn all around in one’s head to a chaos. The chaos of impressions is in the painting. Aigues-Mortes is at the same time alive in red, and dead in black and grey. Its walls and towers grow out of the green and white, salted plains.

Kokoschka painted a view of Aigues-Mortes as seen from the Constance tower. He painted the roof of that tower a brown-yellow, and that colour contrasts fully with the blue sky overhead. Kokoschka used few brushstrokes to paint that sky. His aerial perspective is limited to a whitish glow above the horizon and to a deepening blue above. Kokoschka only rendered the impression he had of the town, in few and rapid brushstrokes. This is expressive painting, in which is expressed how the painter felt about the view. He just saw the colours, the now clashing black contours of the walls and the harsh pure colours of Southern France. The town and the Camargue alluvial plains enfold beneath. History is here: a figure in a tunic wearing a jar reminds of the link with the other side of the Mediterranean. And the Mediterranean is in the sky, deep blue, turning to green and then into the disappearing yellow light of the southern sun.

Tunis

Tunis was where Louis IX died of the plague after having nursed the crusaders that suffered from the same illness. Kokoschka went to Tunis. He painted a marvellous canvas of the market in the town. The market is bustling with hooded people, chaos and too many impressions again. The white walls surround the central market in which the shops are brown ochre of colour. A lone palm tree tops it all. But there is light everywhere, no black and grey as in Aigues-Mortes. Tunis is very bright colour. The sky is blue, but there are more green hues. Tunis is here and alive, a living sign also that the Europeans, who came here as conquerors, did not arrive in a depleted, backward land, but in a rich culture of active people. The contrast with Aigues-Mortes where no human is seen, except the Arab of the other side anyway, is striking. Aigues-Mortes is dead, as its name indicates a town with only a history and no present. Tunis however is very alive.

Toledo

Of 1925 also dates Kokoshka’s view of Toledo. The crusades were the continuance of the Spanish reconquista, the re-conquering of the Roman and Visigoth territory and culture on the Arabs. Toledo is the most Spanish of towns in Spain. Burned by the sun, turning around its river.
The painting is all in red and ochre as the panes of the roofs of the houses. The town and the hills are one. Joyful green patches of fields appear. The sun scorches all, and the sky is not blue anymore but all light. Again, as in Aigues-Mortes, the view is from above. But here the view is wider and more far into the horizon, more open and thus more peaceful. There is joy in this painting, loveliness, sameness, and closeness.

Annecy

Annecy is also a town rich in history. Here is where the reign of the powerful Dukes of Burgundy ended when the Swiss armies defeated Duke Charles the Bold in the sixteenth century. His body was found naked and frozen, half eaten by dogs, under the walls of the town.
Annecy is a French town on the borders of a lake, near the Alps mountain chain. It is almost a Swiss town, but with the softness of France. Annecy is all sadness. So is the painting. Yet, this is the best landscape of Kokoschka. This is a marvellous painting of Kokoschka, almost a textbook Impressionist painting. Some of the forcefulness of his paintings of Aigues-Mortes and Tunis has disappeared; the immediate splendour of Toledo has left. In their place come the blue tones. The waters of the lake, the mountains and the skies are coloured with the same soft, delicate hues in which the town is hidden. This is blue-grey Annecy in November, in autumn fogs. The foreground is harsher again, with a dead tree stump and a sole narrow trunk pointing to the light above the mountains. It is a realist painting, but all is emotion, and the vision of Kokoschka is transformed by his wandering thoughts.

Prague

The picture of Prague is very different from other town views of Kokoschka. Prague is flamboyant. As flamboyant as the colours of the sky. A very mysterious town grows organically out of the forests of Bohemia. This is a vibrant picture, like the one of Tunis, but this town is distant, inaccessible, and mystic. Prague is the end of a journey, as if the pilgrim Kokoschka had been travelling through the thick forests and then suddenly received this surprise vision of a town that has conquered and opened the forests. Prague is a town that probably remained closed for Kokoschka, far and away, not understood, yet a haven hidden in the forests, the end of a journey also for the artist.
Prague remains itself, very European, magnificent always, born out of nature, that is one with nature and of course that dominates the land. It looks formidable. Its high Saint Guy cathedral towers top the hills of Hradcany. Lower is the Mala Strana quarter and the Moldau river. Still further on is the new town, so Prague lingers on and on, a long smear in green nature. As in the picture of Annecy we find a tree in the foreground, but the Prague tree is well alive in green and red.

Kokoschka

Aigues-Mortes, Prague, Toledo, Annecy. The patterns, the structures become clear. The Kokoschka towns are seen from an elevated point, a tower or promontory usually in the town itself or close by. The views are curved. Two visions are superimposed.
The first vision is the realistic one, the town as it can be photographed. Kokoschka never was an abstract painter, so he painted the towns more or less realistically and not merely the idea he had of a town. He did look at the scenes while painting. But he had a second vision, and that second vision transformed the first. This is how Kokoschka saw the town in his mind, with his feelings and the impressions he had of the unfolding scene. For Aigues-Mortes it was death and transitoriness, for Annecy blue gloom, for Toledo the Spanish brilliance of all pervading light, for Prague the surprise and the mysticism of a rich history of centuries that did not die. Kokoschka always expressed his second vision on top of the realism of the scenes. The structure, the curved view, the two visions were instinctive to Kokoschka. They were repeated until the end of his life, seldom changed.

Oskar Kokoschka was born in 1886 in Austria, in Pöchlarn, a little town on the Danube west of Vienna. He started to work in the Wiener Werkstätte, an artistic workshop dedicated to the Symbolist, decorative Art Nouveau, in which the major Austrian artists like Gustav Klimt were associated. Klimt supported him, as well as an architect, Adolf Loos, who was his first Maecenas. Loos took him with him on travels to Switzerland and Berlin.
In the Berlin of 1911, just before the First World War, Kokoschka encountered Herwarth Walden, the director of the dark expressionist magazine "Der Sturm". Kokoschka discovered expressionism, and part of his work from that period on, especially his portraits, is fully expressionist. Still later, Kokoschka met the painters of the art movement "Der Blaue Reiter", a movement originally founded in Munich, who were less expressionists than colourists, and he worked also with them.

In Berlin, Kokoschka learned to know Alma Mahler, the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler. He fell madly in love with her. Kokoschka could not stay long in one place. He was restless, as he would be all his life. The couple visited Italy, Venice, and Naples. He made many passionate paintings and drawings of Alma, expressionist paintings of Alma and himself. But the relationship ended in 1914 and the disappointed Kokoschka engaged in the Austrian army ^C1.

In August of 1915, Kokoschka was severely wounded at the Russian front. But he returned to the front, now at the border with Italy, where fierce battles took place between the Austrian and Italian armies. He made many war drawings of the front lines of the Isonzo River in Italy, where he worked in a group of painters-reporters.

After the war, Kokoschka taught at the Academy of Dresden in Germany ^C1. Dresden was a town in Eastern Germany, also with a tradition of artistic schools. In the beginning of the century the Expressionist movement "Die Brücke" was born there. Dresden marked a new, bright period for Kokoschka and slowly he reverted from Expressionism to an own style. He met a girl in Dresden, a student singer, Anna Kallin, and took her with him on new journeys through Europe ^C1.

Kokoschka left Dresden already in 1923, and between the period of 1923 to 1934, restless as ever, he continued his frequent travels all over Europe: Switzerland, the South of France, Paris, London, Lyon, Bordeaux. But also Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt and Palestine. He remained three years in Paris, went through a period of depression, mainly in 1927, during which he painted the Annecy view, and then returned to Vienna. In 1934, just after the death of his mother, Kokoschka lived in Prague, where he became a friend of the President of the Czecho-Slovakian republic Thomas Masaryk. Both were admirers of the Bohemian scholar Comenius.

In Prague also, he met Olda Palkovska, a law student, and married her ^C1. From that period, 1934 to 1938 date his many views of Prague, the capital of Bohemia. The Second World War threatened, so Kokoschka and his wife Olda left for London just before the German Nazi army entered Czechia. They stayed in Great Britain and mainly in Scotland, with a Czech industrialist family, until 1953. From that period date wonderful landscapes of Scotland and even more wonderful colour drawings of flowers. These belong to the most intimate delicate pictures of Kokoschka. Directly after the war, Kokoschka and Olda made many journeys to the South of France, Spain, Switzerland always, Rome, Florence, Greece, and Jerusalem.

In 1953 Kokoschka and his wife finally settled in Switzerland, in Villeneuve on the Léman Lake ^C1. He also painted the landscape of the Léman Lake in 1957. He visited other artists in Switzerland, among which the musician Pablo Casals of whom he made a portrait. Kokoschka continued his travels: Venice, Berlin, New York.

Oskar Kokoschka died in 1980 at the age of 94 in Montreux, Switzerland. So, his life spanned the twentieth century in which he saw and participated in two world wars. Some years later after his death, his wife Olda Kokoschka created a foundation in the Jenisch Museum of Vevey, Switzerland.

Kokoschka is probably the ultimate wanderer among European painters. He travelled much, saw many landscapes, met many different people, and met different schools of painters. He sought out artists, musicians, and scholars. Why this restlessness? Was it because the destruction of Europe and the tensions in politics everywhere affected him so much that he was nowhere at ease? It seems typical that only at the end of his life did he find quietness, and remained more in one place. And then this place was still in Switzerland. He even stayed in the part of the country where French and not German was spoken.

Switzerland is typical the European land that was a refuge amidst turmoil, a haven for political refugees. Switzerland attracted artists from all over Europe. It was the stretch of peace hidden in its mountain valleys. It had remained neutral in the wars; all allies had used it, and it had been spared. Thus, Kokoschka resembles the Europe of the twentieth century.
Europe was very complex, passionate in ideas, in constant struggle with itself, finally completely at war and ending its world supremacy, then exhaustedly and blindly groping for a peace that did not come because after the wars the political antagonisms changed but remained. The antagonisms were now even accentuated between the capitalistic but democratic West and the communist East; the long cold war succeeded the real wars and did as much damage to the minds of people. Maybe Kokoschka was not restless, maybe he only sought his own particular peace, could not find it except somewhat in certain southern parts of Europe, around the Mediterranean, where so many memories of earlier history were conserved. The Mediterranean attracted him because of its history, and probably also because he recognised it was the cauldron and source of European culture. Finally, he hid in the mountains of Switzerland.

It is interesting to look from above at European geography, in the way Kokoschka viewed his landscapes. One sees then the enormous plains that start at the Pyrenees, cover Germany and widen over Poland into Russia. The oceans and seas enter Europe everywhere: Italy, Scandinavia, Greece, and Holland, even Spain are almost peninsulas surrounded by water. The waters permitted easy communication, and also ensured more isolation of cultures. The Mediterranean countries are mostly protected by mountain ranges. The mountains should have guaranteed somewhat more peace, and maybe Kokoschka liked the Mediterranean because of its separation of the rest of Europe, its differing climate and flora.

Kokoschka was indeed an expressionist and remained so. The movements "Die Brücke" and "Der Sturm" have deeply influenced him. Die Brücke, or the Bridge, was founded in 1905 in Dresden by student architects and adhered to by German painters like Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde. Kokoschka always kept to the subjects of the Bridge: man and landscapes, expressed with a maximum of simplicity in lines, and always dominated by the feelings felt at the immediate moment. The painters of Die Brücke wanted to grasp the spirituality beneath what they saw and show that in their paintings, exactly as Kokoschka continued to do in his portraits and paintings of towns.

Expressionism was even harder, darker, deeper, and more radical in the movement "Der Sturm" founded in Berlin around the gallery and magazine with the same name, which were owned by the art critic Herwarth Walden.
Communism entered the scene here; Walden in the end (1931) immigrated to communist Russia and disappeared there.
"Der Blaue Reiter" was an art movement of Munich, founded in 1910 by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. These were colourists, influenced by the French Fauvists.
Kokoschka maybe took his colours from "Der Blaue Reiter"; he never reverted to the black and grey predominant tones of many German and Flemish Expressionists but kept a bright and varied palette of colours. One of the main painters of "Der Blaue Reiter" was Heinrich Campendonck. Campendonck was a teacher at the Academy of Dresden at the same time as Kokoschka.

The painters of "Die Brücke", "Der Blaue Reiter", its predecessor the "Berliner Sezession", and "Der Sturm" suffered dearly in the World Wars. Franz Marc of Der Blaue Reiter was killed in 1916 in the battlefield of Verdun; August Macke of the same movement died in 1914 in Perthes, France. Max Pechstein, Erich Heckel, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and Egon Schiele were soldiers in the first World War, and so was Kokoschka. Beckmann and Dix fled Nazi Germany. Max Beckmann suffered a nervous breakdown at the war front. Emil Nolde was forbidden to work but continued underground. Kokoschka also fled Prague just before the Nazis invaded Czechia.

It is often thought that the German expressionists were a product of World War I. But as we have seen, most expressionist movements started before 1914. Expressionism is much more a product of the times that also produced the wars, of the mentalities and motivations of the pre-war period. Expressionism was born in Germany out of a new tendency in society. The antagonisms between labourers, middle class and nobility came to a final culmination. New values were sought after in that Germany. Maybe this passionate search could only surface in a society of people that never compromised. There was less hypocrisy, less refinement in hiding and subduing issues in German society than in any other European society.

Kokoschka was born and taught in expressionism, and he remained working in this style. He closely knew and participated in the expressionist movements, although each did not last for more than five years. He was deeply influenced by them, or simply had like these painters the same character as shaped by the life and times before and after the First World War. He painted his towns as simple landscapes, authentic, as they were, in a realistic way. His towns were transformed by the idea or the impression he had, and more than the real scene his mind-scene appeared on the canvas. Although he came close to transform the landscapes so that they were almost deformed - Aigues-Mortes is a good example - he never turned abstract like many painters of "Der Blaue Reiter".

Kokoschka remained himself, wounded by war and love when he was young, turned restless, homeless, nervous and quick, maybe in search for a final explanation of a world in derision. An explanation that of course could not be found, also not in history. His story is much the story of the greater part of Europe in the twentieth century.
Finally, he found rest. In Switzerland, a mountainous asylum of marginal artists, of rich industrialists and bankers looking for anonymous money, of emigrants who had to flee their countries and had the luck to have sufficient means to live there. A Switzerland of which many doubt that it was ever a part of Europe. But Switzerland was the only haven of rest in a Europe that had destroyed itself. In that Switzerland, he found the high points from which he liked to look at landscapes. Kokoschka lived intensely fully aware of his own consciousness that was a he himself wrote the source of all things and of all conceptions. He was aware of inner visions and "this awareness of visions is the viewpoint of all life as though it were seen from some high place; it is like a ship, which was plunged into the sea, and flashes again as a winged thing in the air ^G86 ". Kokoschka wrote this in 1912, as a young man of twenty-six years, but this vision remained in the soul of his landscapes.

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Last updated: November 2010

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