Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian painter and playwright, born in Pöchlarn on 1 March 1886 and died in Montreux, Switzerland, on 22 February 1980. A founder of Expressionism, he painted The Bride of the Wind, a storm tossed double portrait of himself and Alma Mahler, and then had a life sized doll made of her, which he took to the opera and finally beheaded.
The doll is the part of his life most people have heard about, and the record behind it is odder than the retelling. Alma had left him, and in 1918 he asked a doll maker in Munich to rebuild her from his drawings.
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The doll maker, Hermine Moos, received twelve letters and an oil sketch of Alma to copy. When the doll arrived in 1919, covered in swan skin, Kokoschka was deeply disappointed. He dressed it anyway, painted it three times over the next three years, and took it out to cafés and the opera.
In 1922 it ended at an artists' party in his front garden, with the head cut off and a bottle of red wine smashed over it. The museums that tell this scene, the Met and the Folkwang in Essen, tell it as he told it: by his own account.
Nobody can say how much of this was grief, how much was performance, and how much was a painter looking for a model who would never leave. One line from his letters to the doll maker says what he wanted from her, and it comes back further down.
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