Kokoschka, Oskar

(born March 1, 1886, Pöchlarn, Austria—died Feb. 22, 1980, Villeneuve, Switz.) Austrian painter and writer. He studied and taught at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts but was dissatisfied because the school omitted study of the human figure, his primary artistic interest. His early paintings were rendered in delicate, agitated lines and relatively naturalistic colours. After c. 1912 he became a leading exponent of Expressionism; his portraits came to be painted with increasingly broader strokes of more varied colour and heavier outlines. While recovering from a wound received in World War I, he wrote, produced, and staged three plays; his Orpheus and Eurydice (1918) became an opera by Ernst Krenek (1926). The landscapes he produced during 10 years of teaching and travel mark the second peak of his career. Shortly before World War II he fled to London, where his paintings became increasingly political and antifascist. He continued his political art after moving to Switzerland in 1953.

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