Kokoschka proposed to Alma Mahler within twenty-four hours of meeting her in 1912. When she later had an abortion, he pocketed a bloodied cotton pad from the procedure, saying it was his only child and always would be. He painted The Bride of the Wind (1913-14) as a double portrait of the two of them, then sold it to buy his own horse before volunteering for the First World War.

He was born in 1886 in Pochlarn, Austria. He was shot through the head in Ukraine and bayoneted in the chest in Russia. He survived both.

After the war, he commissioned a Munich dollmaker named Hermine Moos to create a life-size replica of Alma, sending detailed instructions about the feel of her skin and the weight of her body. Moos covered the figure in feathers instead. Kokoschka eventually staged a public execution: he decapitated the doll and smashed a bottle of wine over its head on his lawn. The police arrived the next morning, thinking he had murdered a woman.

The Nazis declared him a degenerate artist. He fled Czechoslovakia for London after the Munich Agreement and became a British citizen in 1947. His Expressionist portraits are among the most psychologically penetrating of the twentieth century: raw, agitated surfaces that seem to expose the sitter's interior state. He lived to ninety-four.