Born in Lower Austria in 1886, the painter, graphic artist and writer Oskar Kokoschka was initially, from 1904 to 1909, a student at the Vienna School of Applied Arts (with A. von Kenner, C. O. Czeschka and B. Löffler). From 1907 onwards, he worked as a designer in the Wiener Werkstätte and designed postcards and fans, among other things. In the same year he created the illustrated poem "Die träumenden Knaben" (The Dreaming Boys), as well as two theater plays. His friend Adolf Loos arranged for numerous portrait commissions, which made him suddenly famous as a "young savage". The 1908 Vienna Art Show subsequently became a successful exhibition debut. While staying in Berlin in 1910, he worked for the magazine "Der Sturm" and was signed by gallery owner Paul Cassirer. In 1912/13 he taught as an assistant at the Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule. After World War I he took over a professorship at the Dresden Academy from 1919 to 1924. Extensive travels followed, during which he painted large urban and landscape pictures. In 1934 Kokoschka moved to Prague, where he was professor at the academy until 1938. In 1937 more than 400 paintings were confiscated and some of them were shown in the exhibition "Degenerate Art". Kokoschka fled with Olda Palkovska to London in 1938, and in 1947 he received British citizenship. Traveling frequently again - as to the U.S.A. - he acquired a residence in Villeneuve on Lake Geneva in 1951, which continued to become his center of life. In Salzburg he founded the "School of Seeing" with the gallery owner F. Welz, whose artistic direction Kokoschka held until 1962. In the mid-1970s, a severe eye disease began to impair the artist's vision. What Kokoschka, as a "young savage“ and important protagonist of the Expressionist avant-garde, had touched on in terms of content, remained decisive for his life's work: the subtle, sharp-eyed search for truths behind the visible qualities - of persons, landscapes, the world and its appearances.