Bilbao, (EFE) anti-war activism after fighting in the first world war and being persecuted by Nazism, in the second.
The exhibition “Oskar Kokoschka: A Rebel from Vienna” has been organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris; It is made up of 140 works, including paintings, drawings, lithographs, posters and postcards, on loan from different European collections and is curated by Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer.
The exhibition, presented by the general director of the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, Juan Ignacio Vidarte, and its curators, offers “a complete vision of his artistic career” and an “extensive and in-depth review” of the different stages he went through in his long trajectory.
This covered almost the entire 20th century, since it began in the first decade of the century and ended at the end of the 70s.
soul painter
Although he is considered a versatile artist, his career was dominated by portraiture, both of people and of landscapes and animals, in which he reached such a psychological depth that his scholars have described him as a “painter of souls”.
In his first artistic stage, which spanned from 1908 to the early 1930s, his work was marked by figurative portraits of members of the Viennese bourgeoisie of the time.
The portraits showed a style far removed from the pictorial canons of the time in Vienna, closer to decorative Art Nouveau.
His radically new pictorial style, distinguished by the use of intense colours, angular lines and abundant layers of paint that give the figures an extraordinary force, earned him the label of “enfant terrible” of art in Vienna.
Despite this fame, he achieved numerous commissions that his first patron, the architect Adolf Loos, closely related to Viennese high society, obtained for him and influenced other young Austrian artists such as Egon Schiele.
self portraits
The self-portraits that the artist took throughout his career, especially after fighting in the First Great European War and, during his stay in the German city of Dresden, is another facet that distinguishes the Austrian creator.
The curator of the show, Dieter Buchhart, explained that, after fighting in the world war, where he volunteered and was seriously wounded twice, Kokoschka began to “reflect on his own person.”
“He questioned himself because of the trauma caused by the war and thanks to this constant questioning of himself, some of the most important self-portraits of the second half of the 20th century have emerged,” he added.
anti-war
His career was also marked by a nomadic life, in which he traveled through different countries, including Spain, both voluntarily, seeking his own pictorial style, and involuntarily.
This happened forced by the persecution he suffered by the Nazi regime at the beginning of the 30s, when he was included in the lists of “degenerate artists”.
This happened when he lived in Prague, a city from which he fled on the last plane that left for London, where he lived in exile.
The “clear denunciation”, in Buchhart’s opinion, in his works of the wars that ravaged Europe in the first half of the 20th century earned him the label of political activist.
The two posters painted by the Austrian artist denouncing the bombing of Gernika (Bizkaia) by Nazi aviation allied to Franco in the Spanish Civil War fall within this firmly anti-war facet of Kokoschka. These works are owned by the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum and have been included in this exhibition.
From this time of denouncing the Nazi regime and the warmongering that swept through Europe, are two of the paintings that are shown in this exhibition. The titled “Self-portrait of a ‘degenerate artist’” (1937) and “Anschluss-Alice in Wonderland” (1942).
The exhibition also includes a work that denounces the use of nuclear energy for war purposes after the United States launched two bombs against second Japanese cities in World War II. The titled “Liberation of atomic energy” (1947).
The exhibition will star in the spring and summer season of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. It can be visited from tomorrow, March 17, to September 3, with the sponsorship of the BBVA Foundation, a strategic partner of the Bilbao exhibition center. EFE