Lot 214 D

Oskar Kokoschka's late work is characterised by the spontaneous, direct technique of watercolour painting. He captures the delicate, fresh colours of models in nature, found in his garden near Lake Geneva, in still lifes of flowers and landscape views.
The floral still life shown here is also of an unaffected immediacy of great colouristic richness. We do not see an elaborate bouquet, but the lively disorder of simple garden flowers, which have been put together in a glass vase that is only visible as a blur. The painter captures the different haptics of the plants in light, confident brush strokes: the velvety violet petals of a clematis in the upper left corner, the firm yellow bloom of the coreopsis in the front centre, of which the serrated petals are framed by dark outlines, or the woody branch on the right, from which narrow green leaves and soft magenta-coloured flowers hang.