Oscar Kokoshcka March 1885 – February 1980 was an Austrian artist, poet and playwright. In 1928 he commissioned a doll maker to recreate his muse/love into a lifesize doll. He insisted on details and went to great lengths to the specifications of her curves and feel and the texture of her skin. The doll maker made this doll with a skin of feathers which after much company with Kokoschka he ended up beheading the doll, due to his disatisfaction with the result.
Katharina Detzel (1872) was a massuese who was committed to a mental institute and during her time made a lifesize male doll (made with hessian) with ridiculous genitals and spectacles – she hung it in her cell. It appeared to be very comical yet threatening at the same time. Perhaps threatening due to the agressive behaviour of her care from male officers.
Henry Darger
Henry Darger (1892–1973) was one of the most significant self-taught artists of the 20th century.
Darger created nearly 300 watercolor and collage paintings, bound into three huge volumes, to illustrate his epic materpiece, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, a tale about a world torn apart by war. In the Realms of the Unreal is the tale of seven little girls—the Vivian Girls—who set out to rescue abducted children who have been enslaved by the adult Glandelinians. The heroes in this tale are always the children, the villains typically adults. The story of war and peace, of good versus evil, loosely parallels many of the events of the American Civil War