82.30 Three Mountians (Tre Croci)

c. 1913

Crayon on oil paper, 13 1/4 x 17 1/2" (33.6 x 44. 4 cm)

Signed, lr: OK

Provenanve: Neue Galerie, Vienna, June 1932

Pohl stated that she purchased this work in Vienna in 1926, although no documentation exists to support the claim. The water color certainly shows Kokoschka’s characteristic figurative style for this period, when he lived in Dresden. Kokoschka began to abandon the “squiggly” style that had characterized many of his early paintings and painted instead in larger strokes, with broad areas of color contrasts. The artist also eliminated the practice of making preliminary sketches, painting directly on the surface. The Oskar- Kokoschka-Dokumentation-Centrum Pochlarn verifies that this work “might be one of Kokoschka’s Dresden paintings which we have been looking for for a long time.”

Portrait of Mrs. Swoboda Listening to Variations on a Bach Fugue- no. 1 1920

Portrait of Mrs. Swoboda Listening to Variations on a Bach Fugue- no. 2 (The Concert II [Deborah})

These lithographs were reproduced in Vienna in 1920 from a series of ten drawing entitled Das Konzert (The Concert). The figure represented is Camilla Swoboda (1885-1942), wife of the famous Viennese art historian Karl Swoboda. The Swobodas regularly held concerts in their home; on these occasions, Kokoschka drew approximately 30 views of the hostess’ face while she listened to the music, trying to capture her emotional reactions to each movement. He later photographed ten of these studies; these became part of a collector’s portfolio called Variationen uber ein Thema (Variations on a Theme). Here Kokoschka’s graphic hand is still nervous and flowing, with a sense of the movement of the Baroque he so admired.

In late 1913, Kokoschka and Alma Mahler traveled to Switzerland and Italy. They stopped in Venice, where Kokoschka made an intensive study of the great Venetian painters, in particular Tintoretto. The result of this study for his own painting was a more dramatic, a more Baroque use of color in the construction of his compositions. This new coloristic sense appeared most vividly in his oil painting Dolomite Landscape, Tre Croci (1913), now in Hamburg. The scene is a panoramic view from Tre Croci, the passage over the Alps from Cortina D’Ampezzo. Kokoschka made several crayon studies for this painting, of which this work is a larger example. Even in this quick sketch, Kokoschka added streaks of blue and green- evidence of his new appreciation of color in the initial construction of his work.

According to Pohl’s note on the back of the original frame, Kokoschka told her that the fold across the middle of the picture occurred because he “Carried it in his pocket to study.” Given Pohl’s tendency to exaggerate and Kokoschka’s well-known penchant for story-telling, one must view this information with some skepticism. An invoice also shows that, contrary to Pohl’s assertion that she received this work directly from the artist, she purchased it in June 1932 at the Neue Galerie in Vienna, along with two Kokoschka lithographs (82.34 and 82.35) and a Boeckl pastel (82.26). In spite of this, Pohl may indeed have met Kokoschka, who may have been in Vienna at that time.