Oskar Kokoschka. Murder, Hope of Women

With graphic intent: German and Austrian modernist works on paper

From the first decade of the twentieth century, artists in Germany and Austria began to experiment with the radical potential of working on paper. Graphic art offered the opportunity to express complex ideas through the manipulation of materials and innovations in subject matter and form. During this period, artists began to depict subjects that challenged conventional social and class norms, openly expressed fears about an endangered and unstable masculinity, and explored the boundaries of what constitutes art. Formally, they rejected the status of art as a decorative, despised, traditional, idealised representation of the subject, and in some cases dispensed entirely with recognisable forms.

The event will include short presentations of current academic research on several of the artists and artworks in the exhibition, followed by a group discussion among the participants. We will explore the meaning and reception of the works in the context of their creation and how they remain relevant today.

The panel event has been organised to coincide with the exhibition ‘With Graphic Intent’ at the Courtauld Gallery (1 March – 22 June 2025). The exhibition includes works by Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Dix and Oskar Kokoschka. All of the artists represented were connected to the expressionist trends of the time in different ways. Despite their varying depictions, they share the intention of using graphic arts to evoke profound reactions in viewers.

The event will include short presentations of current academic research on several of the artists and artworks in the exhibition, followed by a group discussion among the participants. We will explore the meaning and reception of the works in the context of their creation and how they remain relevant today.

Panel discussion with curators Niccola Shearman and Emily Christensen, with Dorothy Price, Anne Grasselli, Bernadette Reinhold and Cat Hepburn.

Speakers:

Professor Dorothy Price (The Courtauld) is a specialist in modern and contemporary art and critical race history and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her work in modern and contemporary art is characterised by her engagement with decoloniality, gender, psychoanalysis, subjectivity, black studies and critical race history. From 2018 to 2023 she was editor of Art History, the journal of the Association for Art History. Her special issues included ‘Weimar's Others’, ‘British Art and the Global’ and, together with the artist Sonia Boyce OBE RA, ‘Rethinking British Art. Black Artists and Modernism’. She has published on the work of Frank Bowling, Lubaina Himid, Veronica Ryan, Chantal Joffe, Claudette Johnson, Chila Burman, Matthew Krishanu, Permindar Kaur and others, as well as two monographs on modern art in Germany, ‘Representing Berlin’ in 2003 and ‘After Dada’ in 2014.

Dr Niccola Shearman (The Courtauld) is a lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has held academic positions at the University of Manchester and is a regular contributor to the Courtauld Short Courses. Her teaching focuses on art in Germany and Austria up to 1945, and her own research on the modernist woodcut connects theories of empathy and the psychology of seeing by questioning the emotional response to the medium in the aftermath of the First World War. Her article ‘Emotional Viewing’ was published in a special edition of the Journal of the Northern Renaissance in 2023. She also contributed to the publication Tate Expressionists, is writing about an émigré Viennese artist and is co-editing an essay volume in honour of the late Dr Shulamith Behr (to be published in 2025).

Dr Emily Christensen (The Courtauld) is a lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Emily teaches European art of the 19th and 20th centuries and issues of colonialism and representation in Orientalism. Her own research focuses on Orientalism in the work of the expressionist artists Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter. She has published on these artists in Burlington Magazine, World Art, Aesthetica Universalis and Manazir, and has written exhibition catalogue essays on Kandinsky and Münter for the exhibition Re-Orientations: Europe and Islamic Art, 1851 to Today at the Kunsthaus Zürich (2023) and for the Tate exhibition Expressionists (2024).

Dr Anne Grasselli (The Courtauld) completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2024 and is currently a lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her research focuses on the intersections between the art and theories of Wassily Kandinsky and studies in visual perception as advocated by experimental psychologists such as Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt and Theodor Lipps. Anne has recently published her research in a chapter on ‘Abstract Empathy: Wassily Kandinsky and his artistic interpretations of visual perception’ in the edited volume ‘History, Practice and Pedagogy: Empathic Engagements in the Visual Arts’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

Bernadette Reinhold (Oskar Kokoschka Centre, Vienna) has been director of the Oskar Kokoschka Centre (art collection and archive) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna since 2008. She has held research positions at the Commission for Provenance Research at the Federal Monuments Office and on the Wiener Hofburg project and was a board member of the Austrian Society for Architecture (2000–2005) and the Oskar Kokoschka Documentation Pöchlarn (since 2009). Her doctoral thesis (2017) on Kokoschka and Austrian cultural policy led to the publication of Oskar Kokoschka and Austria, Facets of a Political Biography (2023). Other grants and joint research projects include: Oskar Kokoschka. Neue Einblicke und Perspektiven. New Insights and Perspectives (2021, ed., with R. Bonnefoit); Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. Architecture. Politics. Gender. New Perspectives on her Life and Work (2023, ed., with Marcel Bois). A comprehensive reappraisal of the activities of the University of Applied Arts in the mid-20th century led to the publication of ‘Sonderfall’ Angewandte. The University of Applied Arts Vienna under Austrofascism, National Socialism and in the Post-War Period (ed., with Ch Wieder) and will publish Unwritten Biographies – Fractures and Continuities: Artists of the Angewandte Vienna 1933-1955 in 2026.

Cat Hepburn (writer and poet) is an award-winning screenwriter, author and lyricist based in Berlin. Cat writes for film, stage and books. Her second book, ‘Dating & Other Hobbies’, was published in 2021. This year she was nominated for Best Female Writer at the Scottish Comedy Awards. Her solo show #GIRLHOOD, based on her book of the same name, was celebrated at the Edinburgh Fringe with 4- and 5-star reviews. She is currently developing a TV show with Insight MP, and her first novel, I Kissed a Werewolf and I Liked It, will be published by Wildfire Publishing in spring 2025.


Organised by Dr Niccola Shearman and Dr Emily Christensen, Senior Lecturers at the Courtauld, to coincide with their exhibition ‘With Graphic Intent’ at the Courtauld.