The Bay (Nevin Bay?) probably refers to Nevin Bay in North Wales, a place that Kokoschka loved drawing in colored chalk. The work is typical of Kokoschka’s postwar development linked to painting wide-open spaces, expressing the psychic world of the painter and tending towards a clear palette and a return to plein-air neo-Impressionism. It is difficult not to associate the particularly arid and sterile nature of this landscape to the artist’s profoundly depressed spirit at the end of the war as seen in Kokoschka’s letter to Alfred Neumayer in 1946: “the world that I would love to find again, where I journeyed as a happy wanderer is not there anymore. Great cities have disappeared off the face of the earth, great countries have become deserts (...). I cannot live in such a world”.
— Unknown authorship, 1998
