Klimt executes a successful series of portraits…
1907 CE
In these works he treats the human figure without shadow and heightens the lush sensuality of skin by surrounding it with areas of flat, highly ornamental, and brilliantly composed areas of decoration.
Oskar Kokoschka's father lost everything in a financial crash in 1889, when Oscar was was three years old.
The family was forced to move to Vienna, where his father works as a traveling salesman, and his mother cared for the children on limited means.
Tragedy had entered Kokoschka's life early, when in 1891 his eldest brother died.
Kokoschka attended elementary and high school in Vienna and received his first artistic impressions from the stained glass and Baroque frescoes of the Piarist church where he sang in the choir.
He won a scholarship at the age of eighteen, to the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) in Vienna, where he soon became an assistant teacher, giving lessons at night and studying during the day.
He has by 1907 also become a member of the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Crafts Studio), which supplies him with commissions.
At the Kunstgewerbeschule he has learned drawing, lithography, bookbinding, and other crafts.
He is profoundly dissatisfied with the school, however, because it is devoted entirely to the decorative arts and completely omits from its curriculum the study of the human figure.
The Vienna Crafts Studio, too, supports work only in the restrictive field of the decorative arts.
From the beginning Kokoschka's primary artistic interest has been the human figure; this interest is perhaps rooted in the deep concern for humanity that transcend even his concern for art.
He tries to find practical means to pursue this interest.
In his night classes he introduces the thin, muscular children of acrobats as models for his pupils, teaching the latter to make quick sketches—an innovation completely opposed to the aims of the school.
He uses the human figure as a decorative motif in the postcards, bookbindings, and bookplates he designs for Vienna Crafts Studio commissions.
Still, his real desire is to paint monumental pictures of people.
He teaches himself to paint in oils and executes some canvases; but economic necessity forces him to spend most of his time with decorative work, and the general artistic milieu in which he finds himself continues in its failure to support his creative aspirations.
At about this time Kokoschka begins his career as a writer, composing several plays that herald the new Expressionist theater and express his compassionately humanist philosophy.
The most important of them is Mörder Hoffnung der Frauen (1907; Murderer the Women's Hope), a play that expresses his sensitivity to the moral crises of modern life and that is outspoken in condemning the political injustices of contemporary European society.
(He will say in 1933 that in it he "contrasted the callousness of our male society with my basic conception of man as mortal and woman as immortal; in the modern world it is only the murderer who wishes to reverse this state of affairs.")
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