Oskar Kokoschka: View of the Thames

And I'm back! I had a last minute trip up North to see some friends and freshen up a bit as I was getting jaded. Long distance coach travel is horrible but you do see things, and one thing I saw on the way back yesterday in North London was Oskar Kokoschka's apartment.

Kokoschka was a fascinating artist and for me the fascination is in the way I either really like his work or really hate it. He was in his nineties when he died so had a very long career and there was inevitably a lot of stylistic change within that. Although he was mostly an expressionist he was a lot more complex than that suggests, sometimes showing quiet restraint, other times being brasher than a Fauve, sometimes being simple and graphic, other times marshalling a frenzied chaos across his canvas.

I was going to post his famous crab painting which I liked a lot when I was younger but I'm not so keen on it this morning, so instead here is a view of the Thames from 1959.