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The Silent Woman Part 1
On March 25, I9I9 Alma wrote in her diary about a meeting
with Baron Victor von Dirsztay who had come to her on Kokoschka’s
behalf to tell her that the artist still loved her and wanted
to "re-establish some kind of human contact" with
her. Dirsztay was of the opinion that she awed it to Germany's
greatest artist (Kokoschka now had a chair at the Kunstakademie
in Dresden). Although it was true that he was currently living
with another woman, he could only paint Alma and however often
he set out to the other woman still it always turned into
a picture of Alma. Even if this remark has to be treated with
some reservation, some of Kokoschka’s figures bear a
clear resemblance to Alma Mahler. And this was not entirely
subconscious because Kokoschka was still trying to come to
terms with their separation and now even in a somewhat dubious
manner.
In fact as early as July I9I8 he ordered a life-size doll
from the Munich doll-maker Hermine Moos as a substitute for
his lost love. It was to be made to look exactly like Alma
Mahler. On July 22 he already returned a model of the head,
having checked it and made suggestions as to how the work
should proceed.
“I am very curious to see how the stuffing works. On
my drawing I have broadly indicated the flat areas, the incipient
hollows and wrinkles that are important to me, will the skin
- I am really extremely impatient to find out what that will
be like and how its texture will vary according to the nature
of the part of the body it belongs to - make the whole thing
richer, tenderer, more human? Take as your ideal... Rubens'
pictures of his wife, for example the two where she is shown
as a young woman with her children. If you are able to carry
out this task as I would wish, to deceive me with such magic
that when I see it and touch it imagine that I have the woman
of my dreams in front of me, then dear Fräulein Moos,
I will be eternally indebted to your skills of invention and
your womanly sensitivity as you may already have deduced from
the discussion we had."
Numerous drawings of details served to assist the doll-maker
in her work. In addition to this, Kokoschka painted from memory
a life-size oil sketch of his erstwhile lover based on her
"actual measurements" to give an idea of how the
end result should look. And on August 20, I9I8 he wrote to
Hermine Moos "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".
The doll was not finished until the second half of February
1919. On February 22 Kokoschka asked to have the doll sent
to him. The ensuing disappointment was huge. The doll could
scarcely fulfil Kokoschka’s erotic and sexual desires
and in the end became no more than a kind of still-life model.
The artist then took the place of the unhappy lover and by
means of a painterly (and graphic) metamorphosis of the doll
he breathed new life into Alma as a “figure of art”.
Kokoschka’s attempts to animate the lifeless object
and to ignore its obvious inadequacies produced a total of
approximately thirty surviving pen and ink drawings of the
doll.
These can be divided into three groups: The doll sitting
in a chair, lying on a sofa, or with a dog or a rabbit. One
of the most striking and immediate examples of Kokoschka’s
obsession, however, is a painting that he made in Dresden
in June I9I9, showing the Alma-doll, dressed in blue, on the
sofa. In I922 the artist returned to the image of the doll
just one last time, although by now it had already been destroyed.
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