OSKAR KOKOSCHKA (1886-1990)


Bildnis Claire Waldoff signed with the artist's initials 'OK' (lower left)brush and ink on paper laid down on paper13 1/2 x 12 in (34.3 x 30.5 cm)Executed circa 1916
|The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Dr. Alfred Weidinger.ProvenanceNierendorf Gallery, New York.Private collection, New York (acquired from the above).Feigl Gallery, New York (no. 1184).Acquired from the above on January 15, 1960.ExhibitedCambridge, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Twentieth-Century Germanic Art from Private Collections in Greater Boston, March 23 - May 1, 1961, no. 9.61.LiteratureH-M., Wingler, Künstler Und Poeten, Bildniszeichnungen von Oskar Kokoschka, Grimma, 1954 (illustration of the print version p. 43).Claire Waldoff was a renowned chanteuse whose fame reached its zenith during the Weimar Republic era of 1920s Berlin. Waldoff was distinguished for singing in a distinctive Berlin slang studded with curses and drags on her cigarette, all while attired in a shirt and tie complementing her cropped hairstyle. Waldoff was prominent in the avant-garde milieu; she performed with the young Marlene Deitrich at the Berlin variety theaters Scala and Wintergarten and was friends with Kurt Tucholsky, one of the most important journalists of the Weimar Republic.The present work is a drawing for an illustration published on the cover of the December 1916 issue of the periodical Der Sturm. Here, Kokoschka portrays the actress, who was in her early thirties, much older than she is. As Slyvia Roth argues, "Out of her eyes, who have come to know the war only as a cheerful staging, a seriousness and a tiredness look at the viewer as if she had been at the front. This artist, Claire realizes when she looks at her portrait, has escaped the war, but in everything he does, and in everyone he encounters, he is accompanied by the trench. He was showered by his own disillusionment which has gone to bits and pieces, into her face, which is free from any illusion," (translated from S. Roth, Claire Waldoff: Ein Kerl wie Samt und Seide, Freiburg im Breisgau, 2016, chapter 22, n.p).Der Sturm was a German art and literary periodical created and edited by Herwarth Walden, a champion of Expressionist artists who had a fondness for Oskar Kokoschka. Walden intended for his publication, which ran from 1910 until Walden's death at the hands of the Stalinist purges in 1932, to revolutionize culture. Der Sturm was instrumental in the French-German exchange of expressionist artists by publishing works by Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, among others, to be circulated to its wide audience.