Oskar Kokoschka

The young Oskar Kokoschka made his entrance into the art world with a unique series of portraits created between 1909 and 1914. These works are distinguished by the artist’s penetrating characterization that seems to reveal the sitters’ inner being. This exhibition offers the very first opportunity to view and examine these portraits together as a group. The sitters included the poet Peter Altenberg, Paul Scheerbarth, the composer Franz Hauer, the architect Adolf Loos and the art dealer Herwarth Walden.

The show was curated by Dr. Tobias Natter of the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna and was initially presented in the Neue Galerie New York, a museum of modern German and Austrian art that opened on Fifth Avenue in November 2001. The Hamburg Kunsthalle is the only other venue to present this exhibition. The exhibition opens with Kokoschka’s early decorative work for the Wiener Werkstätten, followed by 33 oil portraits and 10 drawn portraits. This exhibition is the latest in the Hamburg Kunsthalle’s very successful series of shows featuring artists’ portraits and self-portraits, which began in 1993 with the self-portraits of Max Beckmann and was followed in 1995 by Vincent van Gogh’s self-portraits from the Parisian period. Lovis Corinth’s self-portraits are to be presented in 2004. A fully illustrated with 265-page catalogue has been published to accompany the exhibition, including a number of critical essays, priced € 26.