Museum PR Announcements News and Information

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen presents Oskar Kokoschka – Portraits of People and Animals

The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen presents the work of Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), in an exhibition on view until January 19 2014. Oskar Kokoschka inspired generations of artists. This major retrospective brings together Kokoschka’s confrontational portraits more than half a century after his work was last exhibited in the Netherlands.

Oskar Kokoschka, The Red Egg, 1940-41, oil on canvas, 61 x 76 cm. Collection Národní Galerie, Prague. © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka, Vevey / 2013, ProLitteris
Oskar Kokoschka, The Red Egg, 1940-41, oil on canvas, 61 x 76 cm. Collection Národní Galerie, Prague. © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka, Vevey / 2013, ProLitteris

In 1950 Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen was the first Dutch museum to purchase a painting by Oskar Kokoschka, ‘The Mandrill’ of 1926. This autumn 150 paintings and drawings from private collections and major museums such as MoMA and Tate will be assembled in Rotterdam. In eight themes the exhibition offers a personal perspective of the painter around the period of the First and Second World War. From a serie of children’s portraits, portraits of the Viennese elite to politically charged allegories. The exhibition begins with Kokoschka’s earliest portraits and his discovery by the famous modernist architect Adolf Loos in 1908. The exhibition ends with his last self-portrait (1971/1972). With the title ‘Time, Gentlemen Please’, the announcement for final orders in British pubs, Kokoschka prefigures his own death.

‘Oskar Kokoschka – Portraits of People and Animals’ has been curated by guest curator is Beatrice von Bormann.