The Dream

Dense lines in irregular patterns convey a sense of movement contained beneath the surface of the image. In this scene from William Shakespeare's "The Tempest", the seated woman tilts her head back and closes her eyes in a dreamlike state, as Prospero's words run along the bottom: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep." Fascinated by the inner truth of things, Oskar Kokoschka developed a style that reveals the forces of movement teeming under the surface.