The Obsession of Oskar Kokoschka: Alma Mahler, Love Letters, and the Life-Size Doll
- dthholland
- 5 minutes ago
- 5 min read
When Oskar Kokoschka fell for Alma Mahler, he didn’t just fall, he practically unravelled. The young Viennese artist’s passion for the widow of famed composer Gustav Mahler was all-consuming, irrational, and ultimately catastrophic. Their story, packed with love letters, jealousy, and a surreal papier-mâché doll, still fascinates today. And while it’s often framed as a cautionary tale about obsessive love, it also tells us a great deal about art, identity, and the blur between memory and possession.
Love at First Sight—Almost
Their paths crossed in 1912, shortly after Alma had been widowed. Gustav Mahler had died the previous spring, and by some accounts, Alma was still wearing a mourning veil when she met Oskar. Her stepfather had commissioned Kokoschka to paint her portrait, but the first impression wasn’t ideal. Oskar, then 26, looked visibly unwell, coughing up blood and seeming too shy to speak. His awkwardness peaked when, after barely saying a word, he suddenly embraced her in a way that felt strange and invasive. Alma, utterly unmoved, pulled away. Oskar stormed out.
But he wasn’t done, not by a long shot. Within days, he had written what Alma would later describe as “the most beautiful love letter” she had ever received. It wasn’t just a one-off. Over the course of their three-year relationship, he sent her more than four hundred letters, laying bare every impulse, desire, and torment. One letter from April 1912 is particularly revealing:
“What you are, I am: if you turn from me, I am once again like no one and have no world. I live in you, and I only live truly and really for as long as you believe in me.”
A Battle of Passion and Possession
Theirs was no quiet romance. Alma later recalled their time together as a “hefty love-battle” filled with passion and suffering in equal measure. Oskar’s love was intense and suffocating. He couldn’t bear to be away from her, pacing the pavement under her window all night while whistling, ostensibly to deter potential suitors but more likely to keep her awake. Even Gustav Mahler’s memory provoked his jealousy. In his autobiography, Kokoschka confessed that he couldn’t tolerate any trace of the late composer, not even a Rodin bust, inside their home.
His art reflected the psychological toll of the relationship. He sketched Alma in disturbing scenes, making love to other men, or spinning yarn made from his intestines. His insecurities spilled onto the canvas. Those close to the couple witnessed the emotional volatility. His mother, Romana, warned Alma in stark terms: “If you see Oskar again, I’ll shoot you.” She referred to Alma as “Circe”, the enchantress of myth who turned men into beasts.
Alma’s Pregnancy and a Turning Point
In September 1912, while visiting her sister in Baden Baden, Alma confirmed she was pregnant. She returned to Vienna, only to find that Oskar had placed Gustav Mahler’s death mask in their living room—a chilling and deeply unwelcome gesture. The relationship, already fraught, began to collapse under the weight of obsession.
In mid-October, Alma had an abortion. Oskar’s response? He kept a bloodied cotton pad from the operation as a grotesque memento: “This is my only child and always will be.” His grip on reality was slipping. By this point, the love that had once inspired four hundred letters was spiralling into something unrecognisable, something delusional.
Alma, meanwhile, reconnected with another admirer: Walter Gropius, the future founder of the Bauhaus movement. Oskar, for his part, enlisted in the Austrian cavalry when war broke out in 1914. He was severely injured in combat, suffering a bayonet wound and later a nervous breakdown. Even as he recovered, his thoughts remained fixed on Alma.
The Alma Doll: Art, Memory, or Madness?
In 1918, Oskar took his obsession to an extraordinary and deeply unsettling new level. Alma had married Gropius in 1915, but Kokoschka wasn’t ready to let go. So, he wrote to a Munich-based artist and former seamstress of Alma’s, Hermine Moos, with a peculiar request. He asked her to build a life-size doll modelled on Alma Mahler.
His letters to Moos reveal a bizarre mix of desperation and artistic direction. He sent detailed instructions, anatomical sketches, and even a life-size painting of Alma. He specified that the doll’s body should be “soft and pliable,” with horsehair used for the pubic area, down-stuffed limbs, and skin that mimicked the “peach-like” texture of real flesh. “Although I feel ashamed I must still write this,” he confided, “the parties honteuses must be made perfect and luxuriant… otherwise it is not to be a woman but a monster.”
Moos was actually his second choice. Oskar had first approached designer Lotte Pritzel, who declined the commission after reviewing his designs. Perhaps she saw what was really being asked of her: not a sculpture, but a surrogate.
Frankenstein’s Galatea
When the doll finally arrived, Oskar was appalled. Moos had used swan skin, complete with feathers, sewn onto sawdust-stuffed limbs. The result looked more like a taxidermied creature than a lifelike lover. “The outer shell is a polar-bear pelt,” he complained, “suitable for a shaggy imitation bedside rug rather than the soft and pliable skin of a woman.”
Still, he kept the doll. A maid named Hulda—or “Russerl”, as he insisted on calling her, was hired to look after it. He began taking the doll to dinner parties, the opera, even cafés. It featured in several paintings, including Woman in Blue (1919), Self-Portrait with Doll (1920–21), and At the Easel (1922). For Oskar, it became a stand-in for both Alma and his own unresolved trauma.
Over time, he rewrote the narrative. In later years, he described unpacking the doll as a near-spiritual experience: “The image of her I had preserved in my memory stirred into life.”
The End of the Affair
But the illusion didn’t last. In the early 1920s, a neighbour spotted what appeared to be a bloodied corpse in Oskar’s garden and called the police. It was the doll. He had decapitated it and poured red wine over its head. It was, as he later wrote, a catharsis: “It had managed to cure me completely of my Passion.”
Though Alma and Oskar would remain in touch over the years, their final meeting occurred in Venice in 1927. They didn’t speak. And yet, decades later, he wrote to her once more:
“If I ever find the time, then I’ll make you a life-size wooden figure of myself… so you can remember me better and through practice also acquire a lust for the real thing again. We will get together again some time.” They didn’t.
Legacy of a Fixation
The story of Oskar Kokoschka and Alma Mahler is one of art, obsession, and the fine line between love and possession. For Oskar, Alma became more than a person, she became a symbol of longing, loss, and unfulfilled desire. His attempt to recreate her in effigy wasn’t just a grotesque stunt; it was a desperate attempt to hold onto a version of her that never truly existed.
In a way, the doll embodied the essence of modernist Vienna, full of contradictions, eccentricity, and emotional intensity. Oskar’s madness may have driven people away, but it also powered some of his most compelling work. And in Alma’s life, he remained a haunting footnote, brilliant, broken, and unforgettable.
