"Oskar Kokoschka was one of the major painters of the first half of the twentieth century. He was born in Pochlarn on the Danube, studied in Vienna, was badly wounded in the First World War, and traveled widely around Europe in the years between the wars. He fled from fascism, first of all in 1934 to Prague and then, when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, to England, where he was naturalized in 1947. In 1954 he moved to Villeneuve in Switzerland. He died in 1980.". "Kokoschka also wrote a number of plays, poems, and stories. Best known are the early plays, such as Murderer, Hope of Women, which anticipated Expressionism. His last play is a large-scale historical canvas on the life of the Czech educational reformer Comenius."--BOOK JACKET.