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| | | Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980)
painter & Alma´s lover Listen to Oskar Kokoschka's voice:
Alma Mahler and Wagner's Tristan (2,8 MB)
World War 1 (7 MB)
About his life (1,6 MB)
Berlin in the 1920s (1,1 MB)
About the Puppet (0,4 MB)
In 1912 Alma met the young painter Oskar Kokoschka, who was known as the enfant terrible of the Viennese art scene. He was violent and unbridled, and the press derided him as »the wildest beast of all«. The acquaintanceship led on to an unrestrained amour fou, an intensive sexual relationship interrupted only during those hours when Alma posed as a model for her loved one. When he was not loving her, he painted her. Kokoschka´s consuming passion was soon transformed into subjugation, and his jealousy into obsession. Kokoschka´s mother rushed to her son´s assistance and wrote to Alma: »If you see Oskar again, I´ll shoot you dead!« Kokoschka´s most famous painting, »The Bride of the Wind«, testifies to this anguished time. When Alma became pregnant by him but had the child aborted, she caused him such a blow that he was never able to recover from it. She sealed his physical downfall by sending him to the front as a volunteer, where he received a serious bayonet injury in russia, in 1915.
| |  | |  | above: The notorious Alma doll, a life-size
copy of Alma
left: Oskar Kokoschka | | |
But the news of Alma´s marriage to Walter Gropius hurt him still more. In deepest desperation, he ordered a life-size doll from a doll-maker in Munich which should resemble Alma in every detail, and he thought it would help him console himself for the loss of his loved one. Not surprisingly, the result was disappointing: a clumsy construction of fabric and wood-wool, which Kokoschka had beheaded at a wild, orgiastic party in his atelier in Dresden, in 1919. And so he separated himself from the curse of his life, Alma, in effigy form. | |
