Stories from My Life By Oskar Kokoschka, Translated by Michael Mitchell

Oskar Kokoschka's Stories from My Life is not a traditional autobiography. There is no attempt to produce a comprehensive account of the details of his life, to record where he went, what he did, or whom he met. Instead he has given us, Kokoschka says, "a random selection of stories from my life, just as they occur to me."Random" is perhaps an exaggeration. What these stories do provide is an inner autobiography, an intense and vivid evocation of incidents and moments which, while often apparently trivial in themselves, reveal the spiritual development of an artist who was not only one of this century's great painters, but also one of its great humanists.