"Now, I want to open up the book of the world before you. And there are no words in it, only beautiful images."

"I can't say why I wanted to paint. The only answer is in the images themselves."

"My plays are not didactic; they simply express my attitude towards the world."

"In life, we have to pay for experiences. If we're lucky, we get a discount."

The Austrian painter, illustrator, and graphic artist, also a poet and playwright with Czech roots, Oskar Kokoschka, is a prominent figure in the Expressionist art movement. He is known for his extravagant portraits, in which he sought to capture the emotions of his subjects, as well as for his paintings of landscapes and urban panoramas. In his time, his provocative work was not widely understood, as he disregarded all rules, ignored established artistic norms, and followed his own path. The Nazis labeled him a degenerate artist. Today, his paintings hang in galleries around the world, from New York to Tokyo, and are among the most expensive at auction.

Oskar Kokoschka was born on March 1, 1886, in the Austrian town of Pöchlarn, in the home of his maternal grandparents. His birthplace now serves as a museum. Every year, from May to October, exhibitions are held there, dedicated to topics such as photography, nature paintings, or illustrations of world literature.

Oskar was the second of four children born to Gustav Kokoschka, a goldsmith, and Marie Romany, née Loidl, the daughter of a Styrian forester. The eldest son, Gustav, died as a baby. Three years after Oskar's birth, Berta was born, and in 1892, Bohuslav was born, a name that suggests that Czech traditions were prevalent in the family. Oskar's grandfather, Václav, and his uncle, Josef, from his father's side, were goldsmiths in Prague, and another uncle was a watchmaker. They owned a house called "U Ježíška" with a shop on Spálená Street. Oskar's father also apprenticed in the goldsmithing trade in the family workshop, but the artistic trade was not thriving in Prague at the time, so after his grandfather's premature death, he sold the shop and workshops and became a traveling salesman. Oskar was not even a year old when the family moved to Vienna due to his father's work. However, they were not doing very well, and they moved several times to smaller and cheaper apartments on the outskirts of the city. Therefore, when Oskar started earning money, he financially supported his family.

From childhood, he strongly believed in signs and prophecies and was fascinated by fire. This was due to a family story about a fire that broke out in Pöchlarn shortly after his mother brought him into the world. The fire destroyed almost the entire town, including his uncle's mill and his grandfather's house. His mother and baby were saved by a quick escape on a high hay cart.

The fascination with fire and its symbolism later reflected in some of Kokoschka's works. For example, in his autobiography, he mentions the fire of Rome as a historical event that inspired him to reflect on destruction and renewal. The same applies to the fire of Lesna, in which J. A. Comenius, whom he deeply admired, lost the manuscripts on which he had been working for almost his entire life. Kokoschka often used motifs of fire in his paintings to express intense emotions or dramatic changes.

In his childhood, he wasn't particularly interested in art; he wanted to become a chemist and conduct experiments. In 1897, he enrolled in the Austro-Hungarian state secondary school, but he didn't enjoy the studies very much. From that time, his oldest surviving drawings and watercolors date, which impressed one of the teachers, who recommended that he pursue a career in painting. Oskar listened to him and, against his father's wishes, in 1905, he applied to the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, which is now the University of Applied Arts. He was one of the few applicants who were accepted and received a scholarship. The school focused primarily on graphic techniques, architecture, furniture, crafts, and modern design, and unlike the more prestigious and traditional Academy of Fine Arts, it was home to teachers of the Vienna Secession movement. One of them was Gustav Klimt, whose work had a strong impact on Oskar. He was also greatly influenced by the Viennese painter Rudolf Kalvach and, above all, Vincent van Gogh. During his studies, he befriended the architect Adolf Loos and, later, under his influence, he rejected the Secession movement, which was still prevalent at the time, and became a pioneer of Expressionism.

Through his teachers, Kokoschka began working with the so-called Viennese Art Workshops, an association founded in 1903 to support art and crafts, and in 1906-1908, he published his first series of eight color lithographs accompanying his ecstatic poem, "Dreaming Boys." It is often cited as one of the foundational works of Expressionism, both in terms of its literary and artistic qualities.

Kokoschka's first recognition came from his portraits of Viennese celebrities, but his main commissions at the time were postcards and drawings for children. In addition to painting, he was also involved in literature, writing poems, essays, and plays. In 1908, he debuted with the scandalous drama, "The Murderer, Hope of Women," for which he created the poster himself, directed it, and presented it at the Garden Theater during the Kunstschau Wien art and crafts exhibition, organized by Gustav Klimt and a group of avant-garde artists.

Viennese society at the time did not understand or accept his play. In protest against the criticism he received from the press, Kokoschka shaved his head and painted self-portraits depicting himself as an intellectual prisoner, punished for his innovative ideas. In the same year, he was expelled from the School of Arts and Crafts because someone like him, a "disruptive element," naturally couldn't stay there. The constant criticism ultimately became the best advertising for him.

He completed his studies in Vienna and, after a brief stay in Switzerland in 1910, he accepted an invitation from the art dealer and publisher Herwarth Walden and settled in Berlin, where he began working with his newly founded avant-garde literary magazine, "Der Sturm." In 1912, he had a solo exhibition at the same gallery, where he also exhibited jointly with Otakar Kubín.

In 1911, Kokoschka returned to Vienna and embarked on a career as a teacher. He was offered a teaching position at his former alma mater, from which he had previously been expelled. He taught there until 1913. In April 2012, he met Alma Mahler, a beautiful widow of the famous composer Gustav Mahler and hostess of one of the most popular intellectual salons in Vienna, who had recently lost not only her husband but also her four-year-old daughter, Maria. He began a passionate love affair with her.

After several months together, Alma became pregnant with Oskar's child, but she refused to let him raise the child and rejected marriage. Kokoschka later admitted that the loss of the child pained him deeply, and he often said that he painted so much because he didn't have children. The tumultuous relationship lasted for two years, but eventually ended because the independent Alma found the painter too possessive and jealous. When she broke up with him on New Year's Eve in 1914, Kokoschka sold the painting "The Bride of the Wind," which he had painted during their time together in Naples in her honor. He used the money to buy horses and weapons, voluntarily enlisted in an Austrian dragoon regiment, and went off to fight in World War I. All of this, among other things, was in response to her telling him in an argument that he was cowardly.

In 1915, Alma married the German architect Walter Gropius, while Oskar was severely wounded in the head in Galicia. He was left on the battlefield, and one soldier even tried to finish him off with a bayonet, piercing his lung. Fortunately, he survived and, after treatment in Vienna, was sent to the Eastern Front near Sochi in 1916, where he served as a war artist, but was wounded again when a bridge exploded. He went to Stockholm to seek medical help for his brain injury, and then traveled to Dresden. The experiences of the war made him a lifelong pacifist.

He was so emotionally and psychologically distressed that, as part of his therapy, in 1918, he had a life-sized doll made in Munich, which he treated as if it were alive... He considered her his muse until 1922, when he symbolically cut off her head, ending his obsession with Alma. In the 10 years since they met, he had written her 400 letters, painted several oil paintings, and countless drawings. His poem "Allos Markar" was also inspired by their relationship.

In Dresden, he completed his drama "Job" with fourteen illustrative lithographs, and from 1919 to 1923, he served as a professor at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.

In addition to teaching art, he wrote articles and speeches documenting his views and practices as an educator. He was influenced by the aforementioned Czech humanist and reformer of education, "teacher of nations," Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius), who lived in the 17th century. Kokoschka's grandfather, Vaclav, was also an admirer of Comenius and applied his pedagogical principles in raising his own children, which was passed down to his grandson.

Oskar received Comenius's book "Orbis pictus" as a Christmas gift when he was a child, and as he later wrote in his autobiography "My Life," it opened up a new world of knowledge for him and accompanied him throughout his life, influencing his decision to become a painter and later an advocate for Comenius's ideas: "Orbis pictus taught me what the world is and what it should be like for people to live in it." He adopted Comenius's belief that students benefit from using all five of their senses when learning. He was convinced that "seeing with one's own eyes" is a fundamental prerequisite for artistic creativity. Therefore, he disregarded traditional methods and taught by telling stories full of mythological themes and dramatic emotions.

After leaving Dresden, he settled in Paris. In the following years, he traveled throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. He created many landscapes and cityscapes, as well as portraits of famous people he met. During this time, he achieved considerable artistic success, and his work became known to a wider audience.

In 1933, he left Paris and briefly returned to Vienna, where he settled in a house that he had bought for his parents years earlier. The political situation in Germany and the looming threat in Austria, as well as the death of his mother, prompted Kokoschka to move to Prague in September 1934, where his sister, Berta Patočková-Kokoschková, had been living since 1919. It was she who invited him to come to Czechoslovakia. In Prague, Kokoschka was not an unknown figure. In December 1933, the art dealer Hugo Feigl organized a successful exhibition of his work at his gallery on Smetana Embankment, and upon his arrival, Feigl arranged most of his commissions. These commissions resulted in 16 Expressionist paintings of Prague. After Feigl introduced Kokoschka to President T.G. Masaryk, a portrait of the president was also created. In 1944, Feigl arranged the sale of the Masaryk portrait to Pittsburgh, and the proceeds were used to support Czechoslovak war orphans. However, Kokoschka did not only paint landscapes and portraits. Along with Picasso, he was one of the most famous modern artists who expressed their opposition to the bombing of the Basque city of Guernica in Spain by the German Luftwaffe on April 26, 1937. Kokoschka created a poster entitled "Help the Basque Children!" which students plastered all over Prague overnight, only to have it torn down by the Prague police due to the risk of a diplomatic dispute with Germany. Later, Kokoschka recalled that he received threats from the Nazis in a radio broadcast: "When we come to Prague, you will be hanging from the first lamppost!" And it didn't stop there. In 1937, a purge took place in German museums and galleries in an attempt to remove paintings and sculptures that Hitler and his followers considered to be degenerate works of art created by the deranged minds of artists with Jewish-Bolshevik leanings. Kokoschka, who had many enthusiastic collectors in Germany, was also included on the list of 18 banned artists, but he was declared a "perverted" and "degenerate" artist by the Nazis. A total of 28 of his paintings and several hundred prints and drawings were confiscated. At the end of 1937, Kokoschka suffered from kidney problems and spent several weeks in a hospital in northern Moravia. During his stay with friends in Vítkovice, he created a portrait that he provocatively titled "Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist." At the same time, he initiated the formation of the Oskar-Kokoschka-Bund, chaired by Theo Balden, which sought to promote art independent of Nazi aesthetics, which labeled his works as degenerate art. In Prague, in the autumn of 1934, Kokoschka met Oldřiška (Olga) Palkovská, a 19-year-old law student and the daughter of lawyer and art collector Karel B. Palkovský. To the dismay of her parents, she began to see him regularly, and he also painted her several times. The age difference between them was 29 years. Palkovský first sent his daughter to Paris and then to London in an attempt to "cure" her of her love for the painter, but to no avail.In July 1938, Oskar Kokoschka was granted Czechoslovakian citizenship. However, the Munich Agreement soon followed, and the Germans began the occupation of the Sudetenland. As a staunch anti-fascist, Kokoschka therefore preferred to flee to London in October 1938, together with Olda, where they married in 1941 in an air raid shelter. During this time, he painted two works: *The Red Egg* (1940), which is now exhibited at the National Gallery in Prague, and *Union - Alice in Wonderland* (1942). He donated the proceeds from their sale to the Free Austrian Movement. They spent the 1940s in England, and in early 1947, they both became British citizens. After a brief stay in the United States, they lived in Switzerland from 1953 onwards, where the first major postwar exhibitions of Kokoschka's work were held in Zurich and Basel. [Image of "The Red Egg" painting] Although Kokoschka was an anti-fascist, he painted a portrait of the first postwar German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, in 1966, which later hung in Angela Merkel's office. He did not regain Austrian citizenship until 1975, but he never left Switzerland. [Image of Konrad Adenauer portrait] Kokoschka and Olda settled permanently in the Swiss village of Villeneuve on the shores of Lake Geneva, where they bought a house called Villa Delphin. [Image of Kokoschka and Olda in the garden of Villa Delphin] From there, Kokoschka regularly traveled to Salzburg, Austria, from 1953 to 1962, where he taught courses in the *School of Seeing* at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, again based on the principles of the educational method of Jan Amos Komensky. He was so fascinated by the personality and life of the "teacher of nations" that in the 1930s, he wrote a play about his life called *Comenius*. The play was later produced in Hamburg in the 1970s, filmed, and a graphic series in color screen printing was created (1976), which was widely distributed as a collector's album. Almost every day, Kokoschka spent time in the garden of his villa in Villeneuve, painting brightly colored watercolors of floral still lifes, some of which became the basis for lithographs. [Image of floral still life watercolor] He also made numerous trips to European and non-European countries and organized various retrospective exhibitions of his work in Switzerland, Austria, and Japan. He lived and worked in his studio in Villeneuve until old age. In 1971, his autobiography, *Mein Leben*, was published, and in 1984, after his death, his correspondence was published. The world-renowned artist died on February 22, 1980, in Montreux, from complications following influenza, just eight days before his 94th birthday. He was buried in the Clarens district of Montreux. After his death, the Oskar Kokoschka Prize was established to recognize achievements in the field of visual arts.