Oskar Kokoschka – Cabinet de curiosités

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name in the Museum Liner Appenzell (11 July 2010 – 9 January 2011) and in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in La Chaux-de-Fonds (14 May – 4 September 2011). The exhibition and the accompanying publication were realized by the Fondation Oskar Kokoschka, the Liner Foundation in Appenzell and the Kokoschka Research Group of the Institute for the History of Art and Museology, University of Neuchâtel.

Throughout his life, Kokoschka was a passionate collector, as proven by some 300 objects that have been preserved by the Fondation Oskar Kokoschka. This exhibition showed for the first time a selection of objects from Kokoschka’s collection in his villa in Villeneuve. A comparison of individual pieces with his pictures makes evident that many of them served the artist as objects of study – for they are to be found again in oil paintings, watercolours and lithographs.