What did Oskar Kokoschka blue plaque do at Eyre Court?

The Story

# Eyre Court, Finchley Road Standing before this elegant mansion block in Swiss Cottage, you're at a crucial refuge in the life of the Expressionist master who fled Nazi-occupied Europe. Kokoschka arrived in London in 1938, his work branded "degenerate" by the regime, and Eyre Court became his sanctuary during the darkest years of the Second World War—a period when this Viennese painter, stripped of his teaching position and his homeland, might have disappeared into obscurity. Here in this northwest London address, far from the bombs and the ideology that had driven him into exile, Kokoschka continued to paint and to teach, sustaining the artistic vision that had made him a pioneer of modern expressionism while serving as a living link between the pre-war European avant-garde and the emerging post-war art world. The flat on Finchley Road represented more than just a place to live; it was where an aging artist rebuilt his reputation and dignity, transforming his exile into a defiant artistic statement that would eventually help rehabilitate modernism's standing in Britain.