Die Traumenden Knaben.
KOKOSCHKA, Oskar. Die Träumenden Knaben. 10 ff., illustrated with 10 lithographs (8 in colour and 2 in black and white), by Oscar Kokoschka. 4to, 240 x 275 mm., bound in the second issue tan cloth binding by Kurt Wolff with lithographic label designed by Kokoschka on front cover, in a plain cardboard protective slipcase. Vienna: Wiener Werkstätte, 1908.
First and only edition of this remarkable book in its second issue binding. This was the first graphic work by the painter Oska Kokoschka. Offered here in a fine copy, Die Träumenden Knaben represents a major document of modern art, in part because Kokoschka's colour lithographs foreshadow the expressionist movement. The coloured lithographs are from the earliest printing.
From 1903 to 1909 Kokoschka studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna; one of his professors being Gustav Klimt. Klimt commissioned this livre de peintre for the Kunstschau which exhibited some of the earliest art works of Viennese Art Nouveau, or Jugendstil. Kokoschka dedicated the book to Klimt.
"In works like his illustrated fable Die Träumenden Knaben ("The Dreaming Youths"), Kokoschka's stream-of-consciousness nursery-rhyme narrative style, and his quirky magic-garden vision -- in which schematic figuration and bluntly stylized organic form floated in uncertain fields of space -- seemed in direct communication with the uncorrupted resources of a child's imagination" (Varnedoe, Vienna 1900 p. 94). The strong colours of his lithographs provide an exotic landscape to support Kokoschka's text. "This book, and Slevogt's Sinbad, Berlin, 1908, are the first important modern livres de peintres from east of the Rhine" (Garvey).
This was the first graphic work by the painter Oskar Kokoschka. At the time Kokoschka published this book, he was an unknown, twenty-one-year-old prodigy; sadly, only a few copies were sold, and the remainder of the edition was only issued ten years later in a new binding by the German publisher Kurt Wolff. Copy 5 from the edition of 275 copies, this being part of the edition rebound and sold by Kurt Wolff in 1917. The Kokoschka coloured lithographs were issued in 500 sets. This is a fine copy.
The Artist and the Book 147. A Century of Artists Books p. 107. From Manet to Hockney 24. Johnson, Artists' Books in the Modern Era 1870-2000, No. 24. Wingler/Welz 22-29. Jentsch 1. Andel, Avant Garde Page Design 41.
Item nr. 166957
Price:
$35,000.00