Hermione Moss

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Hermine Moos (born August 12, 1888 in Frankfurt am Main , † August 15, 1928 in Munich ) was a German doll maker and painter . In 1918/1919 she created a life-size rag doll for the painter Oskar Kokoschka , which his former lover Alma Mahler was supposed to replace.

Life

Hermine Moos came on August 12, 1888 as the eldest daughter of the Jewish engineer Max Moos (born June 1, 1850 in Gailingen; † June 14, 1924 in Munich) and his wife Sofie Juliane Moos (born February 12, 1865 in Frankfurt / Main; † 1942 in Treblinka) in Frankfurt / Main to the world. Two years after her, the sister Henriette, the writer Dr. Henny Moos (born February 10, 1890 in Frankfurt / Main; † November 13, 1941 in Munich). It is not yet known what education Hermine Moos enjoyed. After the family moved to Heidelberg in 1913, she appeared in the local address book under the professional title of painter . In the same year she exhibited two pictures of sea bays in Cassirer's Berlin art salon. In 1914 the parents and their two grown daughters moved to Munich. In 1915 took a painting by Hermine Moos, which the Bavarian King Ludwig III. shows, in a war lottery of the Red Cross in the Munich Glass Palace . In 1917 the family of four in Munich-Schwabing moved into a spacious apartment at Kunigundenstraße 29 on the mezzanine floor on the right, where the famous doll was most likely made.

A doll for Kokoschka

In June 1918 Hermine Moos showed small crocheted figurines in the Hohenzollernhaus in Berlin; shortly afterwards some of her sculptures can be seen in the Dresden art salon Richter. At this time she got to know  the expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka - through the mediation of the neurologist Gerhard Pagel and the Munich artist Lotte Pritzel - who wanted an artificial woman at his side because he found it difficult to cope with the separation from his former lover Alma Mahler .

"Dear Fraulein Moos! Can the mouth open? And are there teeth and tongue inside too? I would be happy! (...) Don't fall into stylization with the eyes! If possible, imitate your own for the eyelid, pupil, eyeball, corner of the eye, thickness etc. Maybe glaze the callus with nail polish. It would be nice if you could also close the eyelids over your eyes. And nowhere do you allow seams in places where you think that it hurts me and reminds me that the fetish is a miserable bellows! "

- Oskar Kokoschka to doll maker Hermine Moos

Hermine Moos took on the order and built a life-size Alma doll from July 1918 to March 1919 according to detailed information in the letter. Oskar Kokoschka, however, was disappointed with the finished product, as the last of his surviving letters to the Munich artist shows.

“Dear Fraulein Moos, what do we want to do now? I am honestly shocked by your doll, which, although I have long been ready to make a certain deduction from my fantasies in favor of reality, contradicts in too many things what I asked of her and hoped for from you. The outer shell is a polar bear skin that would be suitable for imitating a shaggy bedspread bear, but never for the suppleness and softness of a woman's skin. "

- Oskar Kokoschka to doll maker Hermine Moos

One can only guess what the devastating judgment of the then famous painter meant for the unknown Hermine Moos. She earned more ridicule than fame. Accordingly, it has not played a role in art history either. At the beginning of the 1920s she apparently helped with the renovation of the costume department of the Bavarian National Museum in Munich; besides, she probably continued to make little dolls.

Shortly after her 40th birthday, Hermine Moos took an overdose of veronal and died in the morning hours of August 15, 1928 in the Munich-Schwabing hospital. Her grave is in the New Israelite Cemetery in Munich.

Work and reception

The doll for Oskar Kokoschka is certainly Hermine Moos' most important work. Even if their client was dissatisfied, one had to acknowledge that the design of a fabric figure about 1 meter 60 tall, which could close the eyelids and cross the legs, represented a handicraft achievement - especially since Hermione Moos' other sculptures were miniature figures seem to be. In addition, the Alma doll exuded a certain feminine charm, as the traditional photos show. The editor Kurt Pinthus , who at that time lived with Kokoschka in the Dresden guesthouse "Felsenburg" and saw the doll "in person", emphasized in a previously unpublished manuscript that the "fetish" did not look so bad. The "ghostly companion" had "an elastic breast with natural-looking tips and auburn hair like a woman has." However, the surface of the fabric woman was obviously more like a polar bear skin, as Oskar Kokoschka also criticized, than the desired silky skin of a living woman. But she could still serve as a suitable model for his famous painting "Woman in Blue". The artist Hans Bellmer was inspired by the photographs of Hermine Moos' Alma doll to build his surreally twisted fetish dolls.

None of the works of Hermine Moos have survived. All paintings and sculptures are lost. The Oskar Kokoschka Center at the Vienna University of Applied Arts has four photographs showing the doll, which were probably made by Hermine Moos and her sister Henny. They appeared in second-hand bookshops in the 1980s. However, no one thought Hermine Moos' letters of reply to Kokoschka were worthy of tradition.

The statements made by the character of the doll maker Hermine Moos in the play "Alma - A Show Biz to the End" by Joshua Sobol are not based on facts, only on Oskar Kokoschka's letters to Hermine Moos.

literature

  • Justina Schreiber: Hermine Moos, painter , in: Bernadette Reinhold, Patrick Werkner (eds.): Oskar Kokoschka - an artist's life in light images , Ambra Verlag, Vienna 2013. ISBN 978-3-99043-565-6

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/AdressbuchHD1913/0324 , p. 273.
  2. Der Cicerone, bi-monthly publication for the interests of the art researcher & collector, vol. 5, 1913, p. 723.
  3. Allgemeine Rundschau, weekly for politics and culture, Munich, No. 16, April 17, 1915, p. 282.
  4. ^ Supplement to the Berliner Börsen-Courier, vol. 51, no. 277, June 16, 1918, p. 5f.
  5. a b quoted in: Justina Schreiber: Puppen - projection surface for feelings. ( Memento from September 5, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Bayerischer Rundfunk, November 2, 2012.
  6. Oskar Kokoschka, Letters 1905–1919, Vol. I, ed. by Olda Kokoschka / Heinz Spielmann, Düsseldorf 1984.
  7. ^ Carl Köhler, practical costume studies in 600 pictures and cuts, edited by Emma von Sichart, Munich 1926, p. 3.
  8. ^ Justina Schreiber, Hermine Moos, painter, in: Bernadette Reinhold / Patrick Werkner (eds.) Oskar Kokoschka - an artist's life in light images, Vienna 2013.
  9. Kurt Pinthus, Woman in Blue - History of an Image, unpublished manuscript in the Marbach literature archive.
  10. Wieland Schmied, The Engineer of Eros, in: Michael Semff / Anthony Spira (eds.), Hans Bellmer, Ostfildern 2006. p. 19.