Painter, but also writer, playwright and poet, Oskar Kokoschka appears to be a committed artist, carried by the artistic and intellectual upheavals of Vienne in the beginning of the 20th century. By his desire to express the intensity of the states of souls of his time, and a certain talent for provocation, He became for criticism of the terrible child of Vienna from 1908 when, Supported by Gustav Klimt and Adolf Loos, He inspires a new generation of artists, among which Egon Schiele. Portrait painter of the Viennese company, Kokoschka manages to highlight the interiority of its models with unequaled efficiency.
Shaken by his break with the composer Alma Mahler with whom he maintained a tumultuous relationship between 1912 and 1914, Kokoschka engages in the army when the First World War was triggered. He will be seriously injured twice. He then teaches at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where he is looking for new forms of pictorial expressions, in counterpoint to contemporary movements such as expressionism, new objectivity and abstraction.
Tireless traveler, He undertook in the 1920s incessant journeys in Europe, in North Africa and the Middle East. His financial fragility forces him to return to Vienna, who experienced important political disorders from the early 1930s, The binding to leave for Prague in 1934. Qualified by the Nazis as an "degenerate" artist, His works are withdrawn from German museums. Kokoschka then fully committed to the defense of freedom in the face of fascism. Forced to exile, He managed to flee in Great Britain in 1938 where he took part in international resistance.
After the war, It becomes a reference figure of the European intellectual scene and participates in the cultural reconstruction of a devastated and divided continent. He explores Greek tragedies and mythological stories in order to find the common ferment of societies. Distance from culture and Germanic language, He moved to Villeneuve, In French -speaking Switzerland, in 1951. The works of recent years bear witness to a pictorial radicality close to his first works, in their absence of concessions. His belief in the subversive power of painting, vector of emancipation and education, Remains unshakable until his death.
Oskar Kokoschka. A fawn in Vienna brings together a unique selection of the 150 most significant works of the artist thanks to the support of important European and American collections.
The exhibition will be presented at Guggenheim Bilbao from March 17 to September 3, 2023.
Commission: Dieter Buchhart, Anna Karina Hofbauer and Fanny Schulmann, Assisted by Anne Bergeaud and Cédric Huss
In collaboration with the Austrian cultural forum