Oskar Kokoschka

Oskar Kokoschka painted portraits that looked like diagnoses, was called the chief savage by Vienna, and had a life-size doll made of the woman who left him. He trained at the Vienna arts and crafts school, and his early portraits - hands too large, faces flayed of composure - were understood as attempts to paint the sitter's interior state, which was very much of the city of Freud and Klimt. A play he staged in 1909 caused a riot. From 1912 he had a violent, two-year affair with Alma Mahler, out of which came The Bride of the Wind, the two of them lying in a shell of turbulence; when she left him he commissioned a full-size doll to her measurements from a Munich dollmaker, kept it, took it out, and eventually destroyed it at a party. He volunteered in 1914, was bayoneted in the head and shot through the lung in Galicia, and was left for dead. He travelled for years afterwards painting cities from high windows. The Nazis included him in the Degenerate Art exhibition; he escaped to Prague and then to London, took British citizenship, and painted political allegories nobody wanted. He lived to ninety-three in Switzerland. The doll was made by Hermine Moos from detailed drawings and letters he sent her over months, and he was disappointed by it when it arrived. Self-Portrait as a Degenerate Artist, painted in London in 1937, answers the Nazi exhibition directly. He founded a summer School of Seeing at Salzburg in 1953 and ran it for a decade. His late murals and the Prometheus ceiling for a London house are large and little seen. He wrote plays and an autobiography, My Life. Alma Mahler outlived the affair by fifty years and he never entirely stopped painting her.

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