Oskar Kokoschka, the Painter as Playwright

The Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) is primarily known as an exponent of Expressionism in the visual arts, through his paintings and through his graphics. His role in the history of modern German drama has rarely been acknowledged, although he was the author of five plays, written over a period of fifty years. Murderer Hope of Women, The Burning Bush, Job, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Comenius are dramatic visual spectacles on themes recurrent in Kokoschka's paintings and graphic work. Oskar Kokoschka: The Painter as Playwright focuses on the visual elements of the stage works, specifically on the use of color, light, and scenic imagery in their dramatic as well as their symbolic function. It pays close attention to the stylistically and thematically related pictorial works and takes account of Kokoschka's illustrations for each of his plays. This is the first complete critical discussion of Kokoschka's dramas to appear in any language; it is also the first consideration of Kokoschka's work from an interdisciplinary perspective. Included are over fifty photographs, many of them in color. The text is based on much previously unpublished information, the result of the author's many hours of recorded interviews with Kokoschka and his extensive correspondence with Kokoschka's wife, Olda. This study eloquently shows the paintings, graphics, and dramas of Oskar Kokoschka to be one "language of images" and identifies him as one of the foremost innovators of twentieth-century theater, the first German Expressionist dramatist.