Oskar Kokoschka

Kokoschka's studio practice was an extension of his theory of Sehen—seeing—which treated the portrait not as a record of appearance but as a transcription of the sitter's psychological "aura" or vibration. The technical consequence was that sitters were required to be physically animated during sessions. He encouraged them to talk, to argue, to move. The posed silence of the academic portrait was exactly what he was trying to destroy.

He worked in strong morning and afternoon light and avoided the flat high-noon hour, the same working window Klimt observed. His early Vienna studios (from around 1909) were small rented rooms rather than dedicated purpose-built spaces; the "studio" was more a condition of the working session than a fixed location. Across his long career—he lived until 1980—he worked from hotel rooms, rented apartments, and temporary setups across Prague, Dresden, Vienna, Prague again, London, and finally Villeneuve on Lake Geneva. He was a genuinely mobile painter. The easel was his actual workplace, and the easel went where he went.

He painted standing and with considerable physical force. He used his fingers to push wet paint. He used the butt of the brush to scratch into the impasto—the same sgraffito technique Rembrandt had used three centuries earlier, put to very different ends. The finished surface of a Kokoschka portrait is a record of the physical engagement between the painter and the canvas, and that engagement is part of the psychological content.

Kokoschka worked on heavy-weight linen canvases that could tolerate the physical force of his brushwork and scratching. His grounds were conventional—a standard oil priming over the canvas. He did not use the kerosene-leached matte grounds Schiele favored; he wanted the physical tactility of fully-bound oil paint, loaded and visible.

His palette was non-naturalistic by design. Synthetic ultramarine placed in the shadows of a flesh passage—not because the shadow was actually blue, but because the blue carried the psychological pressure he was painting. Emerald green in the planes of the face. Cadmium reds and oranges for accents of intensity. Lead white for the highest lights, often placed thick enough to hold the track of the brush.

His brushes ranged from large flat hog-bristle for blocking in backgrounds and major body masses—fast broad motions, establishing the "narrative space" of the portrait—to fine round soft-haired brushes for the eyes and hands, which he considered the centers of expression and worked with disproportionate care. Eyes and hands got the finest handling. The rest of the face was broader. Background handling was broadest of all.

He rarely varnished his early paintings. He preferred the matte, slightly absorbent quality of unvarnished oil, which supports the non-illusionistic presence of the paint as paint. Later in his career he experimented with egg tempera and watercolor, particularly for his landscape cityscapes of the 1920s and 1930s—the "political landscapes" where he painted aerial views of Paris, London, Istanbul, and Jerusalem as moving, breathing urban organisms.

Kokoschka's process was direct and improvisational. He did not use a preparatory drawing or a charcoal underdrawing on the canvas. The painting began with the brush.

First: the silhouette. Large flat brushes laid in the major masses of the figure and the environment simultaneously. He worked "all over" the canvas rather than from part to part, on the argument that the psychological tone had to be consistent across the whole surface from the first session.

Second: the figure. The silhouette was refined into the specific body in front of him. The eyes and hands were placed. These two passages—the eyes and the hands—were the primary carriers of what he called the sitter's "aura." If the eyes were wrong, the portrait was wrong regardless of the quality of the rest.

Third: the background. The environment was painted at the same tonal key as the figure, not subordinated to it. A Kokoschka sitter inhabits a space that is as psychologically loaded as they are. The space is not a neutral frame.

Fourth: the scrape and rebuild. When a passage felt "stagnant"—his word—he scraped it down with a palette knife and rebuilt it with fresh paint at higher chromatic intensity. He did not glaze over dead passages; he removed them. The underlying logic is the same as Auerbach's decades later, and probably via a direct lineage.

Fifth: the finger and brush-butt pass. At the end of the session he used his fingers and the handle of the brush to push, drag, and scratch into the wet paint. The tactile marks are not decorative; they are structural—they break up passages that have become too smooth, they add the record of physical engagement to areas that are reading as flat.

A painting was done when the "inner life" of the sitter seemed to project from the canvas—his stated criterion, which he acknowledged was subjective. Paintings were often left "open"—in a state that would read as sketch-like to an academic observer—because completing every passage to the same polish would have flattened the psychological variation across the surface.

Kokoschka worked from life exclusively for the Psychological Portraits of 1909-1914 that made his reputation. He painted only sitters he had actually met and spent time with. The portraits of the Vienna intellectual circle—Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Peter Altenberg, and the others—are the documentary record of his actual social world around 1910.

For his later allegorical and mythological works—King Lear, the Prometheus triptych, the political landscapes—he drew from memory, literary reference, and his enormous reading. He rejected photography as a painting reference on theoretical grounds: a photograph, for Kokoschka, was a "dead" instant, lacking the temporal depth that a human being actually occupied. The argument is close to Repin's and Sargent's in spirit, though Kokoschka was more explicitly philosophical about it.

His visual touchstones were the Viennese Baroque (particularly the ceiling fresco tradition of the Karlskirche and the Austrian provincial churches), El Greco's elongated figures and dramatic lighting, and—critically—Rembrandt's late self-portraits, which he considered the foundational model for the "psychological" portrait as a genre. His late career included a major Rembrandt copy project, the result of long sustained study of the late Rembrandts in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum and the London National Gallery.

Kokoschka studied at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule—the same School of Arts and Crafts where Klimt had trained a generation earlier—from 1905 to 1909. His early work for the Wiener Werkstätte operated within the decorative Secessionist framework Klimt had built, but he moved rapidly away from it into a more visceral mode of painting. The 1908 Kunstschau exhibition, where Klimt placed Kokoschka's work publicly, is the date conventionally given for the beginning of Viennese Expressionism as a distinct movement.

Kokoschka was an extraordinarily influential teacher in his later career. In 1919 he accepted a professorship at the Dresden Academy, which he held until 1923. In 1953, after the war and his London and Swiss years, he founded the Schule des Sehens (School of Seeing) in Salzburg—the international summer academy he ran each July for more than twenty years. The Salzburg teaching was the direct transmission of his method to several generations of European and American painters. The syllabus emphasized technical competence in service of critical psychological awareness and demanded that students paint "realistically and loosely"—the specific Kokoschka combination of observed accuracy and expressive brushwork.

His own lineage runs from Klimt and the Vienna Secession through the Viennese Expressionist moment into a distinct postwar European figurative tradition. Lucian Freud cited him. Frank Auerbach cited him. The late-twentieth-century revival of serious figurative painting passed through his work.