Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Who Makes a Doll of their Ex? | History's Worst Break Ups About this episode A 'bad boy' of Austrian art meets the 'loveliest girl in Vienna', what could possibly go wrong? Why did artist Oskar Kokoschka commission a life sized doll of his ex lover, Alma Mahler? And why did that doll end up beheaded in his back garden?
Kate is joined by Caitlin Hoerr, art historian and writer who is currently Chief of Staff and Board Liaison at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC.
This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:37 Speaker 01 In Our Time is a world-class seminar every week. Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? What were lines doing in York in the third century? I'm Misha Glennie, and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world.
0:53 Speaker 02 It's one of the first times, really, that you consistently see someone painting teeth. I know that sounds bonkers.
0:57 Speaker 03 If I was going to define mathematics, I would say it's the study of structure.
1:01 Speaker 01 In Our Time, listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Tea or coffee? Love a cup of tea.
1:14 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely Betwixters. I'm just jumping in here real quick to remind you that if you wanted to come and see Betwixt the Sheets live and in the flesh, you can do so in May. We have got two live events, one in Edinburgh on the 23rd of May, and one in London town on the 25th of May. There will be guests, there will be games, there will be smutty history aplenty. Tickets are available now at fane.co.uk, that's F A N E dot co dot U K, and just search for Betwixt, and we will see you there.
1:51 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely Betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. You are back once again, listening to Betwixt the Sheets. Welcome back. Hello, hello. Let's make some room at the back for the newbies, please. But before we can go any further together, I do have to let you know that this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. Oh, we call that the fair do's warning, because if you keep listening and you happen to get upset, well, fair do's, that one was on you. Right, on with the show.
2:24 Kate Lister? Cheers, my dears, and welcome to the party. The year is 1918, the war is over, champagne is flowing, and artists from all across Vienna have gathered here for another legendary party. The host has opted for chamber music, so the party has somewhat of a ceremonial feel. Over there is the guest of honour, dressed by her maid in the most beautiful clothes, and she is a sight to behold. She's absolutely, what is the word that I am looking for? Fucking terrifying. Yeah, that'll do it. Because the guest of honour tonight is a doll. A human-sized, swan-skin-covered replica of our host's ex-girlfriend. Huh. Yeah, this party has just got weird.
3:29 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwigs the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, with me, Cait Lister. You might not have heard a whole lot about the artists featured in today's episode: Alma Mala and Oskar Kokoschka. That is so much fun to say, I love saying that all the way through this episode. Try it yourself: Oskar Kokoschka, Oskar Kokoschka. Oh, it's fun. But he may have had a fun name, but he was absolutely bonkers. And these two absolutely deserve their place in our little mini-series on history's worst breakups. I mean, look, we've all had messy breakups, haven't we? But have you ever commissioned a life-sized replica of your ex? No? Then you're doing better than Oskar and Alma. And today, I'm joined by Caitlin Hare to talk about this creepy-ass doll
4:12 Kate Lister? and the relationship breakdown that inspired it. What drove Oskar Kokoschka to commission this doll? Who made it? And, yeah, we're gonna have to ask the question: What did he use it for? Ah! Oh, god. Right, let's get over to Vienna.
4:36 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Caitlin Hare. How are you doing?
4:42 Speaker 04 I'm doing well. How are you?
4:45 Kate Lister? I am doing fabulously well because this is the next installment in our little mini-series that we're doing on history's worst breakups. And I have so been looking forward to the breakup of Oskar Kokoschka and Alma Mahler. Not, I mean, what good names are those? Oskar Kokoschka.
5:01 Speaker 04 Yes, they were made to be spoken about.
5:04 Kate Lister? I think so. Now, you are an art historian and you work in art galleries. This is your entire baby. This is your life. Do you remember when you first heard about Oskar Kokoschka?
5:18 Speaker 04 Well, I'd heard about him through all of my art history studies and classes. You know, he's in a lot of museum collections. And we knew that he had this expressionistic style. He's kind of a wild, a wild child. But I didn't quite know just how much that bled into his personal life. And it wasn't until I saw an image of the doll of Alma Mahler, which we will talk about, that I kind of realized there was more to dig into there. And, you know, for as wild as his art is, his life was even crazier.
5:58 Kate Lister? Is he and Alma Mahler, are they big names outside of the art world today? Because there'll be a lot of people listening to this. They won't know either of those names. So could you just give us a little bit of background? I mean, you said that Oskar Kokoschka is, I can't stop saying it like that. It's so much fun. Can you give us a sense of who he is and who Alma Mahler is or was?
6:22 Speaker 04 Sure. So, Oskar Kokoschka wasn't...
6:27 Kate Lister? So much fun to say it!
6:28 Speaker 04 It's so fun. It's just made to be said on a podcast, I think. He was an Austrian painter, artist, playwright and poet. And he was fairly well-known even in his lifetime in artistic circles. He joined the Art Academy in Vienna fairly young and then was kicked out because his art was so scandalous. And so he was very present and in the same circles of a lot of other artists that we would know, such as Gustav Klimt and...
6:58 Kate Lister? Oh, the scream! That one. Yep.
7:00 Speaker 04 Or like the woman in gold
7:02 Kate Lister? Yep.
7:03 Speaker 04 that they made a movie about recently. So he's he's fairly well known. He's collected widely. His art is still in a lot of collections. Alma, you know, has her own degree of notoriety, but she, I think, is more known for her first marriage with Gustav Mahler, who was a very well-known Austrian composer, conductor. They married when she was in her twenties and he passed away in 1911.
7:36 Kate Lister? Okay.
7:37 Speaker 04 And he is really like in an important foundational figure in music at the time and continued to inspire artists throughout, you know, that's certainly the next several decades. But Alma, again, even in her own time, was very notorious. She married three times. She was the talk of the town, even starting in her teens. She was considered the most beautiful woman in Vienna.
8:06 Kate Lister? She's a looker. I like, I'd encourage anyone to Google her. She's a very beautiful lady.
8:10 Speaker 04 She's beautiful. She was witty. She was really well-connected. So in her papers and letters, many of which are in Philadelphia, you know, she has correspondence with just kind of any, any modern composer and musician that you can think of. She was also, you know, there is a journalist at the time who said half the time she was a grand dame and half the time she was a cesspool. So she was
8:39 Kate Lister? Ooh.
8:39 Speaker 04 Yeah, had quite a reputation that is still being unpacked, I think, today by historians. So there are people who are trying to say she was a composer in her own right, a musician in her own right, and trying to reclaim that for her.
8:54 Kate Lister? Yeah, that's something that I've noticed in this little series is that the women's reputation gets very much flattened by being in a bad relationship with some guy, normally who's like, you know, quote, quote, genius. And then her work, her legacy gets completely subsumed underneath this, oh, you know, she was like, not a femme fatale, or like it all went tits up when she was dating this genius. And then that's what she's known for. He fucks off and does a load of other stuff. That's what happened with Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb.
9:26 Speaker 04 Oh, yes. Also notorious.
9:29 Kate Lister? Also notorious, right?
9:31 Speaker 04 Yeah.
9:32 Kate Lister? So, Oshka Kokoshka, would we say he was a looker? Strong jawline?
9:36 Speaker 04 Uh, striking, I would say.
9:38 Kate Lister? Striking. That's a nice way of putting it.
9:42 Speaker 04 And I would also say just his reputation really did precede him. In the nineteen eighteen, nineteen nineteen, people thought that he had lost his mind because of the doll incident, which we will talk about.
9:53 Kate Lister? We'll get to the doll. But like, pre-doll, was he, was he out there? Were people kind of, you know, like, like, maybe if you saw him phoning, calling you, and you saw his number come up, you might just like not answer it? Is it that kind of, like, is he a wildman? What's he doing?
10:08 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's, it's about fifty fifty. So if you were yourself really interested in the avant garde and you wanted to push the limits of what society was telling you you could do and what art was, like, the art schools at the time were telling you you could do, you loved Kokoshka.
10:24 Kate Lister? Okay.
10:25 Speaker 04 Loved how cutting edge his plays were. You loved how intense his artwork was.
10:32 Kate Lister? Right.
10:32 Speaker 04 And then if you had more old fashioned tastes, you did not like him at all. So there's, there's a great story that Archduke Ferdinand saw an exhibition of Kokoshka's work and said, I want to break every bone in his body. Like, this man should not be...
10:48 Kate Lister? What's, what's he doing? Can you, can you describe, like, what's his style?
10:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, his, his style is moody. It's dark. When I think of him, I think of these thick brushstrokes, like, really, um, and there were some critics who said that it looked like his subjects were just bleeding into the paint. Like, he really focused on the emotional intensity. He wanted you to feel something. And he wanted you, as a viewer, to come away with, like, deep emotional resonance to the work. So lots of...
11:23 Speaker 04 Gestural movement in the paint, lots of swirls. He didn't care so much about getting a perfect portrait of a person. He wanted to really capture, capture like their aura, as the kids would say today, in the paint.
11:39 Kate Lister? I guess because today, it takes a lot to shock us in art today. And the stuff that is considered shocking today is really quite like, oh, wow. So when we look at something in the context of the time, and this is early 20th century, today it looks quite, like, I'm looking at some of his paintings now and they seem, you know, there's, there's a bit of nudityness going on, but in general, like, they look quite beautiful to me. This is of it, this has got that expressionist, it's got that slight Picasso-y thing going on. To me, it doesn't look shocking. So could you explain to us what was shocking?
12:10 Speaker 04 Sure. So we have to remember when he's painting, sort of the 19 teens, when a lot of his really well-known work was being created. We're just coming into modernism and post-modernism. So the fact that he would paint him and Alma together, they weren't married, she's half naked. Their expressions, like, if you look at their faces, you can't even really see their eyes. They're kind of hollowed out. And the paint doesn't look clean and smooth. It looks very, there's a lot of layers of paint that makes it look jagged and kind of textural and rough, which was just not what was being shown at the time.
12:53 Kate Lister? I guess if you've never seen anything like this before, if like what you're used to is that Victorian or like, you know, the old masters and it's like that kind of almost, not quite photorealism, but that real classical, and then you see this, yeah, that does look very different, doesn't it?
13:08 Speaker 04 Yes. And to be clear, you know, this was a time, especially in Vienna, in the arts where there was a lot of boundary pushing. And I think because Kakoska, some could call him histrionic in how he presented himself and his interactions with people. I think his behavior also lent this air of this wild man who was kind of unhinged and unmoored by nice society.
13:34 Kate Lister? Okay. Tell us, give us some examples, like what kind of unhinged? We'll keep, we'll keep the Alma Mallo stuff, but like, what were the stories going around him at the time?
13:43 Speaker 04 I mean- There's so many, and of course, so many of my stories right now are about Alma and him. So it may be worth thinking about him in the context of that relationship for some of his crazier stories. But he was taken under the wing of some other artists and architects who really were intrigued by how he just didn't seem to care for the rigid hierarchy of who he was. He needed money, he was working in these circles, but he just didn't behave well, shall we say.
14:22 Kate Lister? Okay, like a kind of a bit of a social grenade. Like if you threw him into a social situation, he wouldn't behave himself.
14:29 Speaker 04 Yeah, so a good example is the first time he met Alma. They're at a party being hosted by her stepfather. There's a commission on the line. Her stepfather wanted him to paint Alma's portrait. And he sees her and immediately kind of scoops her up into this hug that she said was actually kind of violent and startling.
14:49 Kate Lister? Oh yeah, that is a bit weird, isn't it?
14:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, you know, just very much not.
14:53 Kate Lister? Steady on.
14:54 Speaker 04 Yes, yes. So he seems to have not really cared about how he was viewed.
15:05 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Caitlin and the doll after this short break.
15:17 Kate Lister? Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of them, and he really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
15:59 Kate Lister? And what about Alma Marla? So you said that she was married and then he died. Does she have a reputation as a bit of a wild one at this point? Is she running around parties, hugging random people?
16:13 Speaker 04 She has a reputation. So even when, before her marriage, she was known as this beautiful woman, men were lining up already to court her and date her. But at the same time, she was really talented. She was in these artistic circles. Her parents were an artist and a singer. So she was already really ingrained in society. And when she became a widow after the death of her first husband in 1911, it seems that pretty immediately people were lining up to want to be the next husband, the next boyfriend. We know that she kind of didn't take kindly to that. I think she didn't seem to respond very well to all of that.
16:57 Kate Lister? No, she's a new widow. Presumably she inherited his money. She's, you know, she doesn't need to rush into anything right away.
17:07 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly. So at the end of her first marriage, she had embarked on an affair with the architect Walter Gropius.
17:15 Kate Lister? Another excellent name.
17:17 Speaker 04 Yes, excellent names abound here.
17:20 Kate Lister? They really are.
17:21 Speaker 04 And he blew up that relationship. He revealed the affair to her first husband.
17:28 Kate Lister? Brilliant, what a nice guy.
17:32 Speaker 04 Of consternation there. Sigmund Freud got involved. He was giving the first husband advice on how to make her happy and how to...
17:41 Kate Lister? Imagine like things have got so bad in your relationship, Sigmund Freud shows up. That is a marker, isn't it? That's how, wow.
17:48 Speaker 04 Yes, so her reputation certainly hadn't reached the peaks that it would after her first marriage. But we know that there was something in the water there. There was definitely some whispers, some chatter.
18:01 Kate Lister? Okay, okay. So you've said they met at a party. And he does this weird thing of like literally picking her up in a bear hug, which would be weird today in the year of our Lord 2026. That would raise a few eyebrows, let alone, when was this? This was like.
18:18 Speaker 04 This was in 1912.
18:20 Kate Lister? 1912, right, okay. So yes, it's very weird at this point.
18:24 Speaker 04 It's very weird.
18:25 Kate Lister? Do we have any recollection of how Alma felt about this? Was it like love at first sight? Was it passion or did she just, was she just like, what a dick? And then it kind of, you know, like she, he grew on her after a while.
18:36 Speaker 04 No, it was very quick. So she noted in her diaries, the hug was weird. It was violent. It was strange. That very day, he wrote her what she called the most beautiful love letter she'd ever received. And I think it was pretty immediate after that. They were.
18:52 Kate Lister? Love bombing.
18:53 Speaker 04 Yeah, they were head over heels for each other and very quickly entered into this very passionate, intense relationship. He wrote her hundreds of letters. She characterized the three years of their relationship as. Yeah, isn't very long, but very intense. And she said it was a battle of love. Never before have I felt so much strife.
19:14 Kate Lister? Wow.
19:14 Speaker 04 And so much hell in a relationship. So intense right off the bat.
19:19 Kate Lister? I'm always hesitant to call these relationships passionate because it's like when you sort of like drill down into it, you're like, actually there was, abusive might be closer to the mark. But I have read that, so you've got this very, very volatile personality in Kukoska. And I've read that he was also hella jealous. So you've got somebody who doesn't respect boundaries, somebody who is also very jealous and very volatile. Like, all right, like, you know, it's very much a mixed bag. She's having a great time one day, but there are downsides to this. And what do they look like?
19:51 Speaker 04 So the downsides are numerous. As you mentioned, he was very jealous. He would stalk her. He would be outside of her house at all hours of night. He would whistle so that if there was a man inside the house with her, which he always thought that there were, he would whistle so that they couldn't relax or get comfortable.
20:10 Kate Lister? That's bonkers, isn't it?
20:12 Speaker 04 It's wild. It must have been so disruptive for her, just even to try to sleep.
20:16 Kate Lister? How's she supposed to have sex with other people while he's outside?
20:21 Kate Lister? Was she, was she having sex with other people? Do we know?
20:24 Speaker 04 Sex? Maybe not. We know that she was still writing and engaging in correspondence with Walter Gropius, who she had been with previously. And so we know that she was keeping this relationship with Kakoshka hidden from Gropius. He does find out about it because Kakoshka paints this double portrait of him and Alma, and he exhibits it in 1913 at an exhibition where Gropius is on like the organizing committee. So he sees it.
20:56 Kate Lister? Wow. Okay. So Marla likes the crazies, doesn't she? That's, she's now had two relationships where the guy blew the lid on it. The first Mr. Gropius, just announcing to her husband, and then Kakoshka, who paints a portrait of them and then exhibits it like where he's gonna see it. Right, okay.
21:14 Speaker 04 Yes.
21:14 Kate Lister? Interesting.
21:15 Speaker 04 And we know, because Alma will say this, she loves genius. She loves people that she views as really talented. So it does seem like for her with that, it comes along with these big personalities.
21:29 Kate Lister? The tortured genius motif.
21:30 Speaker 04 The tortured genius motif, definitely.
21:33 Kate Lister? Right, okay. So he's, he's hanging around the house, he's whistling, he is painting nude paintings of her and him. Was this public knowledge that they were in this relationship? I mean, I guess it is if he's painting pictures of them.
21:46 Speaker 04 Yes, there were, there were certainly salacious rumors about it. And we know there's one specific instance where there was a rumor printed in the newspaper that they had been seen flirting during a performance of her deceased husband's piece of music. And she denied that. We, we don't think that actually happened, but people were certainly aware of the relationship. And I mean, Kakoshka made some 450 works of art, drawings, paintings, sketches of her. So it was hard to ignore the fact that she was his me.
22:28 Kate Lister? I submit 400 portraits in evidence, Your Honor. That's, okay.
22:33 Speaker 04 Yes, yes. Alma at one point wrote, you know, he just painted me, me, me. He just painted her over and over again.
22:41 Kate Lister? That's so int- like, how would you react to that? That it feels suffocating to me, just hearing you talk about it.
22:48 Speaker 04 Yeah, I, it's not my ideal dream relationship, I shall say. Um, and we know that towards the end of their, again, short relationship, she did feel like it was all a bit too much. We can, we can see in her letters towards the end that she's pulling away from him. She's not responding to him and he's writing to her saying like, sure would be great to get a letter from you. It sure would be nice to hear from you. And she would respond and just be like, very dismissive and mean. And then they would reunite and have this intensely emotional, but also a very physical, intensely physical relationship.
23:28 Kate Lister? See, this is the day when the sex is good, you're in a lot of trouble. I relate, I've seen that so many times.
23:35 Speaker 04 Yes.
23:36 Kate Lister? Um, was he seeing anyone else? Or was he all mala, mala, mala at this point?
23:40 Speaker 04 He was all in on Alma. He was proposing to her left and right. Um, it seems like he really wanted her to become his wife. He asked her stepfather for permission and he gave it. You know, he seems a little like he, you know, there's a lot to say by, I think, other smart historians about that relationship. And she kept turning him down to the point where at one instance, Kokoshka puts in the newspaper an announcement of when their wedding is going to be, thinking it would force her hand. And she just leaves town and she stays out of town until the date of this wedding has passed.
24:19 Kate Lister? I was gonna ask you, why do you think she keeps turning him down? But I feel like you have kind of answered that already. But why do you think that she wasn't interested in making this man her husband?
24:29 Speaker 04 She was scared. She wrote that she was scared of his violent streak. She worried that he had more violent tendencies. She thought he was also childish and she thought even, you know, she loved his genius. She thought he was a, just a talented painter and that he would go far. But I think towards the end, especially his personality just was off putting to her. And she dreaded, she wrote that she dreaded having his children. She did not want to have children with him. She did get pregnant at least one time by Kokoshka and they make a decision.
25:10 Speaker 04 She claims together to have an abortion and that just sends him spiraling. And kind of spells the end of their relationship, actually, is that decision to have an abortion.
25:21 Kate Lister? And also, there's the outbreak of war, the First World War, which seems to have an impact on this.
25:26 Speaker 04 That was really, if not the nail in the coffin, it did have a big impact, so.
25:32 Kate Lister? I must have been the only person in the entire world going, "Thank fuck for that." The outbreak of war.
25:40 Speaker 04 Her writings at the time, like in 1914, when the war breaks out, are so interesting because she kind of feels like she's so miserable because she's dealing with Kakoska. She's in love, writing to Gropius at the same time, that she's kind of like, she knows the war is a big deal, but she's also like, "Well, I'm also miserable," you know, like.
26:03 Kate Lister? Okay.
26:03 Speaker 04 It makes sense that the world is kind of falling apart around me.
26:08 Kate Lister? But Oscar Kakoska goes and fights in the war, doesn't he? So he's removed from the situation.
26:13 Speaker 04 Yes, and while he is removed, he fights on the front lines in Russia. He gets injured, very badly injured from his telling of it. I think Alma didn't believe that he had been as injured as he probably was. And while he's gone, she marries Gropius in 1915.
26:32 Kate Lister? Oh, she goes for Gropius?
26:33 Speaker 04 Yes, yes. So that is the end of their romantic relationship, is when he finds out that she's married this other man, and he's devastated.
26:44 Kate Lister? Right, okay. So he returns from the front terribly injured, presumably thinking, "Well, at least I can go back to my one true love." When does he find out that she has? Does she tell him? Does she write him a letter and give him a heads up?
26:57 Speaker 04 I don't think she wrote him a letter. I think he heard from mutual friends and from other people, so.
27:04 Kate Lister? That's, that would hurt.
27:05 Speaker 04 It would hurt. And he, you know, we have a letter in 1918 that he writes to her and passes along through a friend, where he says basically like, "I'm still just as in love with you." As I was the last time I saw you. And she seems to consider for a brief moment, her, her relationship with Grobius at that point is kind of rocky. Um, and then she, she says, actually, no, like, I don't want to re-enter this relationship.
27:32 Kate Lister? Okay, okay. And the question then becomes, how did Kakoshka deal with this rejection? Did he have a brief period of mourning and then moved on? Did he do some self-reflection, have some therapy, maybe go on holiday with his mates?
27:50 Speaker 04 You know, he did perhaps the opposite of all of that.
27:54 Kate Lister? Oh.
27:55 Speaker 04 Um, so he, in 1918, writes to a famed dollmaker, Hermione Moose, and he commissions a life-size doll to be made of Alma to her specific measurements. And he wants it to be as lifelike as possible. He tells her, I want to be able to touch the body and feel like it's flesh. Um, and he, we just have, we have so many letters that he sent to this, this woman, this dollmaker, where he's asking, like, can the mouth be opened? Will it have teeth? Um, here's what I want the pubic hair to be made out of. And here's how I want the skin to feel.
28:37 Speaker 04 And he was, I think, safe to say, obsessed with the idea of this doll.
28:42 Kate Lister? Could you imagine being Hermione Moose and getting these letters? Like, you're just running your doll business. Just, you're, you're making a decent profit. You're selling to little kids and doll, and you know, and maybe adult collectors. And then this happens. But interestingly, she doesn't say, sling your hook. She doesn't say, I'm reporting this to the police immediately. Please leave me alone. She does take on his commission.
29:08 Speaker 04 She does. And we know that he had asked another dollmaker before her. And that dollmaker turned him down.
29:15 Kate Lister? Oh, to see those letters.
29:16 Speaker 04 I know, it's, it's so funny. But what does end up happening is the doll that she creates and sends back to Kakoshka is so unlike what he has ordered and requested. And we're not quite sure why that is.
29:37 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Caitlin and the doll after this short break.
29:49 Kate Lister? Hello Betwixters, I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there, and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of them, and he really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
30:31 Kate Lister? Could you describe, I mean, I would encourage everyone now, just go and Google it, just put Alma Malah doll into Google, and it will come up, but can you describe what this, and it was supposed to be like a life-sized Barbie doll, like, you know, like a sex doll looking like Alma Malah. Can you just tell us, describe to us what the doll looked like?
30:49 Speaker 04 It's grotesque, I think, is, it is entirely covered in downy white feathers. The face is misshapen and just very strange looking, and it's-
31:05 Kate Lister? Stuffed with sawdust, wasn't it?
31:06 Speaker 04 Stuffed with sawdust, yes. Very lumpy, the, the outside coating is swan skin, which is why it's feathery. And he was so dismayed when he received it. He said, "It gave my butler a stroke." And he said, "I wanted to dress it, I wanted to put it in silk and lingerie, and I can't, how could I do that?" It's like trying to dress a polar bear.
31:32 Kate Lister? He's got no shame about this at all, does he? He's not like, like trying to conceal what he's doing. It's like, "I wanted to put knickers on it, now I can't."
31:39 Speaker 04 Yes.
31:39 Kate Lister? It's just like, "Oscar, my..." And I often think, like, where, does he have friends around him? Was anybody saying, "Oscar, like, I know, like, we're all really sad about this, but maybe take this down a notch."
31:50 Speaker 04 I mean, it doesn't seem like if he was receiving that kind of advice, that any of it pushed through. And some of this is exaggerated too, because word got around, you know, people were concerned, especially because it seems like he did at least take the doll out, driving with him, he took it to cafes. Some people claimed to even like took it to the opera and he hired a maid to take care of it. And I've never seen images of it clothed in all of the images. It's nude and you can see very clearly these defined like breast and pubic areas.
32:28 Kate Lister? Oh, it's got tits. It's got, it's got tits, it's got a face and it's got puce, but it looks like the Gruffalo. It's the most demented looking thing, but here is the kicker. And this is something that art historians are really like, really, you know, get in there with. Hermione Mose was a very skilled doll maker. She was like, if she wanted to, she could have made him his Malah Dolly and she doesn't.
32:51 Speaker 04 And she doesn't. So some people do think that was her own way of saying like, screw you. I'm not going to do this to another woman. And some people just say, you know, it was, there were still wartime shortages and she probably just couldn't get the materials that she wanted.
33:07 Kate Lister? I did what I could with what I had.
33:09 Speaker 04 We don't have any of her responses back to him. So, um, her, she's a little silent in the archive as far as that's concerned. So, I mean, I would love to imagine that she, she sort of did this on purpose and that she was in some way.
33:26 Kate Lister? That reading.
33:26 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'm trying to protect Alma.
33:29 Kate Lister? He paints this doll as well, doesn't he? Like the way he painted Alma, he paints it obsessively too.
33:34 Speaker 04 Yes, he does. And the paintings are almost creepier than the doll itself.
33:38 Kate Lister? Hella creepy. Yes, they are.
33:40 Speaker 04 Yes, because in, and I, again, I would encourage people to look at photos of the doll. The doll is white and feathery and.
33:49 Kate Lister? Lumpy.
33:50 Speaker 04 Lumpy, lumpy is a good word. And in the paintings, there's especially a self-portrait that he does with the doll. And he's rendered the flesh kind of human colored. And he's made the face, the face doesn't look fully human, but it's closer to human than the doll itself. So it's a little hard to tell at first glance if it's the doll or if it's Alma kind of splayed in this painting. Legs spread, body fully exposed. It's hard to tell at first whether it's the human or the doll.
34:24 Kate Lister? And he's taken it out and about and he's dressing it up and he's taking it to cafes and the opera. Caitlin, do you, do you think he had sex with the doll too?
34:34 Speaker 04 I think he had sex with the doll. I think he did, or at least he tried. You know, I think he at least tried and we know that he had it. We know that he had it and but at a certain point, he claims later in life that once he had painted it enough, once he had had it in his life enough, he was done and it had rendered out all of his passion that he felt for the object and for Alma. So he decides, I'm done with it. I'm gonna do away with it.
35:03 Kate Lister? But he doesn't even do that.
35:05 Speaker 04 No.
35:05 Kate Lister? In a reasonable way. It's not like the doll just ends up in a wheelie bin to be collected on a Tuesday. Is it? What does he do?
35:11 Speaker 04 No, so he throws a big party. He invites people over. He has music and champagne and he gets wildly drunk. And he takes the doll out to the garden and he beheads it and then throws a whole bottle of red wine on it. And just leaves it in the lawn, presumably to go sleep off his hangover. And he claims that he was awoken in the morning by the police because someone thought that the doll beheaded in his yard was a real human woman that he had burned. Yes.
35:44 Kate Lister? Amazing. Do we, do we have any information about where the doll actually ended up? It was disposed of somewhere?
35:51 Speaker 04 It was disposed of. It was destroyed. We know a modern, like a contemporary artist has remade the doll. I think that happened in 2008 or something like that. So there is a copy of the doll in existence.
36:04 Kate Lister? It's deranged, this story.
36:06 Speaker 04 It's so wild. It's so wild.
36:09 Kate Lister? Does this help Oscar in any way process? Like what's, what's the, actually, before we get to that, did Alma know about this?
36:18 Speaker 04 We are sure that she did. We know, again, as I said, we know that he wrote her in 1918 as he was commissioning the doll to try to rekindle the relationship. But she doesn't really acknowledge it, like in her autobiography.
36:31 Kate Lister? I bet she doesn't.
36:33 Speaker 04 It's not mentioned. We know that they do, there's some later correspondence from Kakoshka to Alma, like later in life.
36:43 Speaker 04 That I still think is wildly inappropriate. He offers her to make a model of himself with a member that she can take to bed at night with him.
36:53 Kate Lister? Why, Oscar? Why? Oh, my God.
36:57 Speaker 04 Yeah. So, you know, at that point, the relationship was done and dusted. We don't really know why.
37:06 Speaker 04 Well, Alma, I do think, you know, her marriage to Gropius was very rocky. She divorced him in 1920 and she had already had an affair with a poet before that marriage ended. So we know that she was very consumed with her own love life and her own art, you know, the artist that she was trying to to help and support financially. And then, of course, there's another war that kind of blows a lot of things up.
37:36 Kate Lister? Is there anything in her hand about how she felt about this incident? Or does she just avoids talking about it and skirts around it for the rest of her life?
37:45 Speaker 04 Not that I've seen. She really doesn't mention it. It doesn't come up in in her autobiography, at least. We know that she does keep paintings that Kokoshka has made of her. She keeps those until the end of her life. And to the end of her life, she says, he's a genius. So the doll incident didn't kill that for her.
38:10 Kate Lister? Wow.
38:11 Speaker 04 Yeah.
38:12 Kate Lister? That is some that is some messy, messy stuff there. If that's not the line, which like, actually, I think this is the time to go no contact. What about Oscar then? Did he make any more dolls of anyone else? Did he? Oh, hello, puss cats. He's just walked into view. Beautiful. No, we love it. We love it when cats turn up.
38:35 Speaker 04 He loves a Zoom call. Sorry.
38:37 Kate Lister? They all do. But do we, do we have any sense of like, did he get healthy after this? Did he find a nice girl and settle down and never do anything mad again? Like, what happened to him?
38:49 Speaker 04 So we know that he traveled extensively through Europe, North Africa, the Middle East in the 1920s and 30s. He returns to Vienna in 1931, but moves to Prague in 1935 as a result of the Nazis growing power. And in 37, the Nazis condemn him as a degenerate artist. So he ends up actually fleeing to England during the Second World War. And he does marry when he's in his 50s to seems like a nice, younger woman who was with him for the rest of his life. And he likewise painted her, seemed very happy with her. And he continued to create art and be well-respected. I think he died in 1980 in Switzerland.
39:34 Speaker 04 So he lived a good, long life of creating art and being well-known.
39:40 Kate Lister? As a final question then, I mean, this is a messy breakup. This is like, you know, everyone's had bad breakups, but this is next level stuff. This isn't a healthy processing of the breakdown of relationships whatsoever. But do you think there was anything good to come out of their relationship?
39:56 Speaker 04 Well, I mean, I think even Alma herself would say that the art that came out of their relationship was worth creating. I think it's hard to say. Her reputation was very complicated in her life and afterwards. Like, she was really, I think, again, known as this like eloquent, witty woman who also just had these terrible relationships and couldn't stop entangling herself with terrible men. I think she would say, and I think Kakoska would say, the art is the good that comes from it. And the pushing, he continued to just push forward the limits of
40:38 Speaker 04 Artwork for the rest of his career. And, you know, I don't necessarily think it excuses anything, but Alma would say the fact that his artistic genius was given so much from her being his muse was what it was worth.
40:56 Kate Lister? Yeah, I think we got some nice paintings. Yeah, you're right. She would definitely say that. But I think the lesson to take away from this is just don't make dolls of people that you're breaking up with.
41:06 Speaker 04 Absolutely. Absolutely. Don't make dolls.
41:11 Kate Lister? Don't make them out of swan skin and sawdust.
41:14 Speaker 04 No. And don't try, don't carry them around with you and, and take them to parties.
41:20 Kate Lister? Please don't do that. And then behead them in the garden. All of that. Don't do that. But you can do nice paintings. Caitlin, you have been wonderful. Thank you so much for coming by to tell us this completely bonkers story. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Are you on social media?
41:38 Speaker 04 I am. So I'm mostly on Substack these days. Caitlin Hare, H O E R R at Substack. And that's the best place to find me.
41:47 Kate Lister? Fabulous. Well, thank you so much for coming by. You've been an absolute hoot.
41:51 Speaker 04 I don't know. Thank you. This was so fun. I love talking about these crazy kids.
42:02 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Caitlin for joining me. And if you like what you heard, get therapy. That's what I would say. I'd say so get some therapy right now. But if you like the podcast in general, then don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we've got the final installment of our little mini series on history's worst breakups. And this time, we're in Renaissance Rome with the naughty Borgias, featuring a bit of incest and a whole lot of impotence. And if you'd like us to explore a subject, or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt and Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast
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