Oskar Kokoschka

Private Collection, Austria (acquired from the artist)
Acquired from the above by the present owner in the late 1990s

Vienna, Belvedere, Träumender Knabe - Enfant terrible, 2008, no. 34, recto illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Linz, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Oskar Kokoschka - Ein Vagabund in Linz, 2008, recto illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Executed on buff-coloured wove paper, not laid down, attached to the reverse of the overmount at intervals along the upper edge. There are four areas of complex tears on the right side, all supported on the verso. There is a flattened fold down the centre that is supported by a 6cm. long strip of paper tissue on the verso running vertically down from the top edge with five other smaller supported areas on this central crease. There is a 4cm. supported tear running vertically up from the foot at the centre right. These damages are all fairly unobtrusive on the recto. Apart from some paper skinning along the upper left corner of the verso, this work is in overall fairly good condition.
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Executed in 1907, Studien nach dem Akt von Lilith Lang is a brilliant testimony to Oskar Kokoschka's avant-garde Expressionist style. The work belongs to a series of nude and semi-nude studies of 1907-08 depicting Lilith Lang, the artist's young girlfriend. Working alongside Egon Schiele, he early on rejected the decorative aesthetic of fin de siècle Art Nouveau and Viennese Secessionism and began to develop his own highly individual style emerging as one of the most important Austrian Expressionist artists of the 20^th century.

As evident in the present work, the model's lithe limbs excellently served the artist's highly expressive rendition of the nude. Alfred Weidinger remarks on the artist's development of style: 'Kokoschka's drawings of those years are increasingly angular in shape whereby anatomy becomes secondary to the expressive interpretation of form. Furthermore, the complex balance between positive lines and negative space effectively creates inner spatial effects resulting in an overall geometry of composition' (Träumender Knabe - Enfant terrible (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., p. 118; translated from German).

 

Verso:
093L1005_5MGDN_1