Die träumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Youths)

The Dreaming Youths was Kokoschka's first graphic work, published when the artist was only twenty-one years old. Commissioned by the Weiner Werkstätte, the important progenitor of Jugendstil (Viennese Art Nouveau), Kokoschka's illustrated book was designed as a picture-poem featuring ten lithographs and a text written by the artist. Kokoschka's colorful, exotic landscape imagery supports the book's loose narrative, a stream-of-consciousness account of the fantastic dreams of adolescent boys. When first published in 1908, only a few copies of the book were sold. The remaining edition was later purchased by a German publisher and re-issued in the present binding in 1917.