Oskar Kokoschka, Hermine Moos, and the Alma Mahler Doll

Summary

Oskar learned to love — or at least live with — the monster, hiring a maid named Hulda (whom he insisted on calling Russerl) to wait on it hand and webbed foot. He hard launched their relationship at prominent cafes, operas, and parties thrown in its honor. He represented the doll incessantly, as he had once captured Alma’s attitudes, creating pen-and-ink drawings and oil paintings. Woman in Blue (1919), Self-Portrait with Doll (ca. 1920–21), and At the Easel (1922) all hail from this period. In his old age, he remembered the doll differently, replacing the initial disappointment he had expressed in letters to Moos with a glowing, almost beatific autobiographical account. “In a state of feverish anticipation, like Orpheus calling Eurydice back from the Underworld, I freed the effigy of Alma Mahler from its packing. As I lifted it into the light of the day, the image of her I had preserved in my memory stirred into life. The light I saw at that moment was without precedent.”