In 1916, after the Austro-Hungarian artist Oskar Kokoschka was rejected by his lover, composer Alma Mahler, he had a this life sized replica doll of her made. He wrote that the “point of all this for me is an experience which I must be able to embrace!”
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Alma Mahler met Oskar Kokoschka in 1912, one year after the death of her husband, Gustav Mahler. They had a fiery, destructive relationship. Mahler described Kokoschka as “the wildest beast of all.”
Things got so bad, Kokoschka’s mother warned Mahler to stay away from her son. She wrote “If you see Oskar again, Ill shoot you dead!”
The relationship fell apart & when Mahler found out she was pregnant with Kokoschka’s child, she decided to terminated the pregnancy. Kokoschka ran away to join the Austrian cavalry in 1914. When he returned, he learned that Mahler had married architect Walter Gropius.
He did not take this news well.
In 1918, Kokoschka hired Munich based artist & dollmaker Hermine Moos to create an exact replica of Mahler. Over several months, Kokoschka sent Moos meticulous drawings and written descriptions of what he wanted.
“Please make it possible that my sense of touch will be able to take pleasure in those parts where the layers of fat and muscle suddenly give way to a sinuous covering of skin.”
“Pay special attention to the dimensions of the head and neck, to the ribcage, the rump and the limbs. And take to heart the contours of body, e.g., the line of the neck to the back, the curve of the belly.”
“For the first layer (inside) please use fine, curly horsehair; you must buy an old sofa or something similar; have the horsehair disinfected. Then, over that, a layer of pouches stuffed with down, cottonwool for the seat and breasts.”
Now, Moos was a highly skilled artist & she knew how to make a doll. So, its very unlikely that she wouldn’t have known what she produced was not up to spec. In fact, many critics believe she deliberately created a monstrosity as a ‘fuck you’ to Kokoschka & his creepy request
She made the doll of sawdust sewn inside swanskin, with the feathers still attached. It’s lumpy, goggly eyed, and furry. It more closely resembles the Gruffalo than it does a woman.
When it arrived in February 1919, the sight of the thing was so disturbing, kokoschka later recalled to the photographer Brassaï, that his butler promptly suffered a stroke.
Kokoschka was devastated.
Kokoschka was devastated.
He wrote to Moos: “The outer shell is a polar-bear pelt, suitable for a shaggy imitation bedside rug rather than the soft & pliable skin of a woman. The result is that I cannot even dress the doll, which you knew was my intention, let alone array her in delicate & precious robes”
“Even attempting to pull on one stocking would be like asking a French dancing-master to waltz with a polar bear.”
Nevertheless, he tried to make the best of it. He brought his doll to the opera, hosted parties in its name and even hired a maid to dress it up and wait on it.
He produced more than eighty drawings and paintings of it, as well as a series of photographs. His most famous three paintings of the doll are..
“Woman in Blue" (1919)
“Woman in Blue" (1919)
“Self-Portrait with Doll," (1922)
“Self-portrait near the easel" (1922)
In the early 1920s, claiming the doll had entirely “cured” him “of his passions,” Kokoschka held a party to destroy it. He wrote...
“I engaged a chamber orchestra from the Opera. The musicians, in formal dress, played in the garden, seated in a Baroque fountain whose waters cooled the warm evening air. A Venetian courtesan, famed for her beauty and wearing a very low-necked dress, insisted on seeing...”
“the Silent Woman face to face, supposing her to be a rival. She must have felt like a cat trying to catch a butterfly through a window-pane; she simply could not understand.”
“Reserl paraded the doll as if at a fashion show; the courtesan asked whether I slept with the doll, and whether it looked like anyone I had been in love with… In the course of the Party the doll lost its head and was doused in red wine. We were all drunk.”
The next day, a police patrol happened to glance through the gates, and seeing what was apparently the body of a naked woman covered with blood, they burst into the house. Finding it was only a giant doll, covered in wine , with its head cut off, they left.
Alma got remarried fo Franz Werfel and briefly settled in France. When the Nazis invaded, Alma and Werfel, who was Jewish, had to flee the country. They had to walk across the Pyrenees into Spain, to evade the Vichy French border officials.
From there, they traveled on to Portugal and then boarded a ship for New York City. In 1946, she became a U.S. citizen and eventually settled in New York City where she continued to write music.
