February 2007: Berlin – The Neue Nationalgalerie – Kokoschka's The Women and the Doll

Oskar Kokoschka's Sex Toy: The Women and the Doll Who Conceived the Artist Bonnie Roos How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? --William Butler Yeats, "Leda and the Swan" (1923) Upon returning home from World War I, Oskar Kokoschka found that his lover, Alma Mahler, had married another man. In response, he commissioned the creation of a life-size doll to match Mahler's exact proportions.
Kokoschka provoked rumor and scandal as he escorted his doll to the opera, held parties in its honor, and hired a maid to dress and service it. This provocative public performance inspired rampant speculation about what else, exactly, Kokoschka did with the doll. The doll met its "unnatural" demise when one of Kokoschka's parties got out of hand. Police questioned Kokoschka in the morning about a murder; a beheaded and bloody body was reportedly seen outside his home. Evidently it was the naked, wine-splattered doll, which had somehow lost its head during the revelries of the previous evening. This was the story that Kokoschka and his critics, both then and now, loved to tell, embellishing racy details, speaking to fetishism, sex dolls, pranks, and occasional misogyny.