Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980)

'What is nowadays labelled Expressionism could have come into existence only in Germany, where there was a desire to carry art to the masses, to the "new man", as a reaction against Jugendstil or Art Nouveau, which set out only to beautify the surface and made no appeal to the inner life' (Oskar Kokoschka My Life, London, 1974, p. 66).

Executed in 1907, Tochter des Gauklers is an outstanding early drawing by Oskar Kokoschka that reflects both the young artist's prodigious mastery of line and his pioneering 'Expressionist' concern with the outward expression, through the body of his subject's inner life and psychology. Depicting a thin, semi-naked young girl on the cusp of puberty, standing in an awkward and expressive pose, the drawing is one of the finest of a radical series of drawings of the children of a circus family that Kokoschka made while studying at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna. 'There', as he later recalled in his autobiography, 'I got the children of a circus family, who used to live by modelling in the winter when there was no other work, to play and leap around, so far as the space allowed. Every day I made great sheaves of lightning studies. Capturing the various movements and twists of the body in action really stimulated me unlike the tedious academic instruction' (Oskar Kokoschka, My Life, London, 1974, p. 19).

Tochter des Gauklers is a more carefully composed and finely crafted work than most of these dramatic and often experimental drawings aimed at capturing the inner dynamism and energy of his unorthodox subjects. Concentrating on a contrast between the awkward semi-naked form of the young girl, her strange but expressive pose and her powerfully meditative gaze, Kokoschka in this work has created a startling graphic portrait of the awkward in-between state of adolescence. Seeming to contrast the apparent maturity of this figure's melancholic introspection with her youthful, possibly even malnourished physique, this exquisite, simple, but also startlingly bold line drawing sets a template for the powerful figures of youths that populated Kokoschka's famous posters for the 1908 Kunstschau and his graphic poem Die traumenden Knaben.

It is an important part, therefore, of an extensive series of works from this period concerned with a graphic expression of the strange state of adolescence as a kind of metaphor for the societal misfit. This was a psychological state of being all too familiar to the young Kokoschka at this time, who felt himself at odds with Kunstgewerbeschule life and teaching while also fast gaining a reputation for himself as both a precocious genius and the leading enfant terrible of the Viennese avant-garde. All these qualities, along with the stark and simple use of a masterful graphic outline to delineate a powerfully expressive, if also awkward, figure in this work, are ones that closely anticipate the subsequent graphic work of Egon Schiele three to four years later. Indeed, the strange but expressive pose of the girl in this work with her arms crossing both in front of and behind her is one that Schiele himself experimented with in several of his early drawings and paintings of adolescents, most notably perhaps in a famous watercolour self portrait of 1910.