CISLEITHANIA AUTHOR · BIOGRAPHY · AUTHORS
Oskar Kokoschka
Also known as: Kokoschka, Oskar, Kokoschka, Oskar, 1886-1980.
Alma Mahler-Werfel (born Alma Margaretha Maria Schindler; 31 August 1879 – 11 December 1964) was an Austrian composer, author, editor, and socialite. Musically active from her early years, she became a fixture of Vienna's fin de siècle cultural scene, and struck up friendships and relationships with a number of notable artists and composers. Alma was trained in composition by Max Burckhard, but ceased her compositional activity in 1902, when she married composer Gustav Mahler, who died in 1911. Between 1911 and 1914 she had a passionate affair with Oskar Kokoschka. In 1915, Alma married Walter Gropius, and they had a daughter, Manon Gropius.
Most acclaimed
Letters
"A landmark of postmodern American fiction, Letters is (as the subtitle genially informs us) "an old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers each of which imagines himself factual." Seven characters (including the Author himself) exchange a novel's worth of letters during a 7-month period in 1969, a time of revolution that recalls the U.S.'s first revolution in the 18th century - the heyday of the epistolary novel. Recapitulating American history as well as the plots of his first six novels, Barth's seventh novel is a witty and profound exploration of the nature of revolution and renewal, rebellion and reenactment, at both the private and public levels. It is also an ingenious meditation on the genre of the novel itself, recycling an older form to explore new directions, new possibilities for the novel."--BOOK JACKET.
Kokoschka
A major figure in the Expressionist movement, Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) studied in Vienna, and early in his career was strongly influenced by Art Nouveau, particularly the elegant style of Gustav Klimt. Around 1909 he painted the first of his Expressionist portraits, which seem to reveal their sitters' emotional life. The restless draftsmanship and broken patterns of color in these likenesses predict the emergence of the artist's mature style in such paintings as Bride of the Wind of 1914. Seriously wounded in World War I, Kokoschka produced little work until 1924, when he began a series of journeys through Europe and North Africa that refreshed his creative spirit. During this period he embarked on a number of color experiments, particularly in landscape paintings, in which he combined a traditional organization of the painting's space seen from a high viewpoint with brilliant colors, set forth with his characteristic energetic brushwork. These visionary landscapes communicate a passionate vision, seeming at times exhilarated, at times anguished. In the 1930s, the artist's work was condemned by the Nazi regime as "degenerate" and his paintings in public collections were confiscated. In 1938 he moved to London, and after World War II, to Switzerland, where he spent most of the rest of his life. Kokoschka's late paintings retain the Expressionist qualities of his best mature work, and though he never fully deserted representation, their increasing abstraction reveals a kinship to Abstract Expressionism.
Briefe
1994
For two decades, beginning in the early 1870s, Robert Keller, music editor for N. Simrock Verlag in Berlin, worked with diligence and devotion to usher into print most of Johannes Brahms's major compositions, including all four of his symphonies, the Violin Concerto, the Double Concerto, the Second Piano Concerto, and numerous chamber, choral, and vocal works. This volume collects for the first time the complete extant correspondence between Brahms and Keller, as preserved in the collections of the Library of Congress and the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. To read their correspondence is to witness a relationship of mutual respect and increasing friendship and to gain an appreciation for the meticulous labor that went into the publication of Brahms's masterpieces. This edition includes transcriptions of the letters in the original German and English-language translations.