Famous Expressionist Artists - Oskar Kokoschka

"Human Beings are not still lifes" - these are the words of Oscar Kokoshca, an Austrian painter, printmaker, and poet. He is particularly well-known for his powerful, expressionist renderings on canvas. As an artist, he is quite famous for his depiction of Viennese celebrities and was part of the great Viennese artist trio that also included Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. His paintings placed him in the frontline of early modernism. His early canvases are said to reveal the soul of his sitters within their scoured pigments and electric outlines.

Oscar Kokoschka was born, the son of a goldsmith in 1886 at Pöchlarn. In his childhood, Oscar did not really have any inclination towards the realm of art and he had originally planned to become a research scientist. However, his drawings greatly impressed one of his instructors at school and he landed himself a scholarship to learn at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule), joining there in 1905. That very same year, he began painting in oils on canvas.

Intense human feeling and also influences of both the post-impressionists and the Fauves can be seen in Kokoschka's paintings during the period 1909-1914. For Kokoschka, his subjects were not objects but just storehouses for emotions and concealed sources of tension. His portrait of "Peter Altenberg" which is seemingly set in a Hellish environment, for instance, shows Peter with weary, sad eyes; a face through which blood appears to be rushing; and with arthritic and gnarled hands. One of his masterpieces of the period was "Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat" - a depiction of a renowned art historian and his spouse.

In the "Portrait of Rudolf Blumner", the emphasis is on the power hidden under the external facial features and also on the unique, affecting power that the hands have. One of his most well-known canvases - "The Tempest" or "The Bride of the Wind", was painted in 1914. This work portrays the Artist with his lover Alma Mahler with whom he shared an intensely intimate relationship from 1912 to 1914. This is said to be one of the few works from which observers get the feel of Oscar as a lover instead of a beast.

In 1935, he was in Prague and a year later he painted Thomas Garrigue Masaryk who was Czechoslovakia's President at the time. In 1953, he taught a course entitled the "School of Seeing" at Salzburg. In 1970, Oscar began working on his autobiography entitled "Mein Leben". He spent his final years in Switzerland where passed away on the 22nd of February in the year 1980.