‘When I am drawing or painting, visitors are not welcome … as if behind a window pane, the outside world stays outside’, Oskar Kokoschka wrote of himself in 1961. Fortunately for posterity, in the 1950s and 1960s the photographer Gertrude Fehr was sometimes permitted to capture the artist at work in his ‘library’, the studio at Villa Delphin in Villeneuve. On one such occasion in August 1967, Kokoschka’s attention was not focused on the garden through his window, nor was he working on a portrait of a visitor, but he was studying a bouquet of freshly picked summer flowers grouped around magnificent roses.
The artist’s gaze reflects the total concentration he invested into breathing life into each of these watercolours, although often seen as ‘exercises’ to practice his art. The work comes alive in the interplay of colours, which have been applied with such apparent ease. We can share the moment of truth, on which the watercolour’s success hinges, and the mystery and miracle of flowers that bloom and perish as a metaphor of the joy of existence.

Johann Winkler

Literature: Musée Jensisch, Vevey (ed.): Werke der Oskar–Kokoschka–Stiftung. Vevey 1994, cf. ill. p. 203.