Lot Essay
This work will be included in the second volume of the Oskar Kokoschka Drawings and Watercolours catalogue raisonné being prepared by Alice Strobl and Alfred Weidinger
In August 1919 Kokoschka signed a contract for a professorship at the Dresden Academy which lasted until 1923. He moved into his studio in the Academy overlooking the river Elbe and was given a house in Dresden's large park called the Grosse Garten, as a guest of the government. After having been gravely injured and traumatised during the first World War, Kokoschka felt settled and secure in Dresden. He took his post seriously, teaching almost everyday and cultivating a close relationship with his students.
During the Dresden period, Kokoschka was influenced by the German Expressionist's work. He started painting landscapes seriously, although his interest still lay with portrait pictures and he made countless drawings.
Max Dvorák described in the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition catalogue, "Ten times the painter [had] drawn the same woman, seen her ten times with new eyes and has recreated her in his mind...It is the transitory and the fluctuating life of the mind which Kokoschka's spiritual studies, the physical is only a reflection of the psyche and is consequently only a partial and ever-changing expression of the onrushing stream of life..." (Exhibition Catalogue, Kokoschka, London, 1971, p. 21).
"Kokoschka was largely unconcerned with capturing a merely physical likeness...His aim was rather to penetrate the inner life of his sitters in search of a kind of psychological veracity. In his autobiography he wrote 'I look for the flash of the eye, the tiny shift of expression that betrays an 'inner movement'." (V. Vergo, Expressionism, Masterpieces from The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano and Milan, 1989, p. 102).
In August 1919 Kokoschka signed a contract for a professorship at the Dresden Academy which lasted until 1923. He moved into his studio in the Academy overlooking the river Elbe and was given a house in Dresden's large park called the Grosse Garten, as a guest of the government. After having been gravely injured and traumatised during the first World War, Kokoschka felt settled and secure in Dresden. He took his post seriously, teaching almost everyday and cultivating a close relationship with his students.
During the Dresden period, Kokoschka was influenced by the German Expressionist's work. He started painting landscapes seriously, although his interest still lay with portrait pictures and he made countless drawings.
Max Dvorák described in the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition catalogue, "Ten times the painter [had] drawn the same woman, seen her ten times with new eyes and has recreated her in his mind...It is the transitory and the fluctuating life of the mind which Kokoschka's spiritual studies, the physical is only a reflection of the psyche and is consequently only a partial and ever-changing expression of the onrushing stream of life..." (Exhibition Catalogue, Kokoschka, London, 1971, p. 21).
"Kokoschka was largely unconcerned with capturing a merely physical likeness...His aim was rather to penetrate the inner life of his sitters in search of a kind of psychological veracity. In his autobiography he wrote 'I look for the flash of the eye, the tiny shift of expression that betrays an 'inner movement'." (V. Vergo, Expressionism, Masterpieces from The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano and Milan, 1989, p. 102).