| Summary: | The renowned Austrian painter, Oskar Kokoschka, commissioned a female artist, Hermine Moos, to make a life-size doll resembling his ex-lover, Alma Mahler, in 1918 and received it in 1919. This doll can be said a collaborative work between Kokoschka and Moos since he gave detailed instructions to her during its production. Among Alma's portraits Kokoschka had made to the point of obsession, this doll is outstanding even aside from its aberrant appearance and a series of his erratic behavior with the doll. He painted the doll as an animated being in his paintings: Woman in Blue (1919), Painter with Doll (1920), Self-portrait at the Easel (1922). In addition to it, come to think of Kokoschka's carrier as a portraitist, the doll gave him a significant aftereffect since he temporarily ceased to paint portraits after the doll experience and his later works marked a sharp contrast with his earlier portraits. This paper investigates how and what influence the Alma doll exercised on Kokoschka's portrait production. First of all, I examine the characters of the doll as a kind of a magic image, a "fetish" or an "effigy" as he called it. His attitude toward the doll was ambivalent and remained uncertain his whole life long. Such a cognitive instability corresponds to the subtleties of love with a doll described in Rainer Maria Rilke's essay "Doll: On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel" (1914). Then, I analyze how such different affective responses were reflected on his doll paintings. The doll in paintings shows different expressions in accordance to his emotional relationship to it; in brief, it varies between a figure composed of dead materials (a doll itself) and a fresh body with a soul (a living human). Especially, the last doll painting, Self-portrait at the Easel, illustrates Kokoschka's detachment from Pygmalionism; a sense of hatred and emptiness made him to caricature both of the doll and himself. Finally, I compare Kokoschka's Portraits and the Doll paintings in the respect of psychological projection. Ernst Gombrich once characterized his portraits as the products of empathy and projection in his essay "The Mask and the Face" (1970). Extending this idea, I analyze Kokoschka's early portraits from 1909 to 1914 known as the representation of the "inner faces" of his sitters and later portraits after 1930's which can be regarded as the reflection of the doll experience. In Brief, Kokoschka's sitter is a kind of the screen where his inner image is projected, in that sense, his sitter is objectified or "dollificated". In fact, the representation of a person in a portrait often becomes comparable to an artificial doll in its appearance. Through the above discussion, this paper clarifies the uniqueness of the Alma doll, and places it in the context of Kokoschka's portraits.
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