A fine impression of the artist's 1919 portrait of the innovative Austrian-American theater and film director and actor, Max Reinhardt. 

Unnumbered sanguine impression printed by Pan-Presse, published by Paul Cassirer, Berlin, on wove paper, with full margins. Titled within the plate, signed in pencil lower right and inscribed "orig. Litho 1919" by the artist.  Scattered foxing and staining, a number of significant horizontal creases, nevertheless very striking. Sight: 19.5 x 27.5 inches (50 x 69 cm), matted and framed to overall 26.5 x 35.5 inches (67.5 x 90.5 cm). Provenance: Collection of Warren Robbins, Founding Director, National Museum of African American Art, Smithsonian.

Emily D. Bilski, Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture 1890-1918, exh. cat., The Jewish Museum, New York and University of California Press (Berkeley and New York, 1999), fig. 186, p. 224

Of course best known as a painter, Oskar Kokoschka  was also deeply immersed as a young artist in the world of the theater. In the summer of 1909, two one-acts by the twenty-three-year-old painter premiered in Vienna in an outdoor theatre built in the garden adjacent to the art museum as part of the second Kunstschau exhibit. The two Kunstschauen (of 1908 and 1909) were organized by Gustav Klimt and his friends in order “to expose the Viennese public to the most shocking and revolutionary forces in contemporary art,” and Kokoschka exhibited in both. The showing of Oskar Kokoschka’s art and his plays cemented his reputation as the most prominent enfant terrible of his day. These exhibitions helped ensure that, by the time he moved to Berlin in 1910, his works would become some of the key contributions to the seminal expressionist journal Der Sturm, gaining Kokoschka a place in the canon of European expressionism.

Max Reinhardt directed Kokoschka's plays Der brennende Dornbusch and Hiob at the Berliner Kammerspielen in 1919 and it was around this time that Kokoschka made the present portrait.  Incidentally, the performances created something of a scandal. Kokoschka recalls:

"At the time, Max Reinhardt feared for the iron curtain; the Schupo, thence the foot patrol police, had to separate the fighting supporters and opponents in the street. I put a masked head that could be removed on the actor Paul Graetz, who had the role of Job.  As the uproar started at the end of the performance, I took my bows in front of the audience and held this empty skull of the dead Job lying on the stage up to their eyes, thumped on it and scornfully screamed at the audience: 'this is how empty your heads are!'"(Mein Leben, p. 170)