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1990, Austria. Proof Silver 500 Schilling "Oskar Kokoschka". PCGS PR68 DCAM!

Oskar Kokoschka CBE (1 March 1886 – 22 February 1980) was an Austrian artist, poet, playwright, and teacher best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes, as well as his theories on vision that influenced the Viennese Expressionist movement.

In 1908 Kokoschka was offered the opportunity of submitting works to the first Vienna Kunstschau. This government funded exhibition was established to both bring in tourists and affirm Vienna's prominence within the art world. Kokoschka received a commission from the Director of the Wiener Werkstätte, Fritz Wärndorfer, for color images that would supplement a children’s book and be displayed at the exhibition. Kokoschka, however, took the liberty of producing images that would serve as illustrations to the poem he wrote a year earlier, Die träumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Youths), which took on the form of an autobiographical adolescent fantasy that was much too inappropriate for a young audience. In his autobiography, Kokoschka explained the origins of the poem which follow his personal experience as a young student who was in love with his Swedish classmate, Lilith. Die träumenden Knaben consists of introductory pages with two small black and white lithographs, in addition to eight larger color lithographs with a vertical column of text positioned beside each image. Influenced by the compositions found in medieval art, Kokoschka depicted various moments in time simultaneously within each individual image. Kokoschka also adopted the bold lines and expressive colors of traditional European folk art and juxtaposed them with the stylized ornamentation and two-dimensional bodies of Jugendstil. The final page, titled Das Mädchen Li und ich (the Girl Li and I), features the angular forms of the young boy (Kokoschka) and girl (Lilith), taking on the style of the Belgian sculptor George Minne. This work, which Kokoschka dedicated to his former teacher Gustav Klimt, demonstrates the transition from Jugendstil to Expressionism.

Die träumenden Knaben along with the tapestry titled The Dream Bearers, which is now lost, were the first works ever to be exhibited by Kokoschka. Like the book illustrations, Kokoschka’s tapestry was pronounced disturbing due to its depiction of youthful, exotic and sexualized fantasies. Upon showing these two works, Kokoschka received backlash from conservative officials and only a small portion of the five hundred copies of Die träumenden Knaben were actually bound and sold. As a result, he was expelled from the Kunstgewerbeschule and found his place within the Viennese avant-garde. Austrian architect Adolf Loos befriended Kokoschka and introduced him to other avant-garde members who then became his subjects in a series of portrait paintings.