Anna Mahler

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Broncia Koller-Pinell : Anna Mahler 1921; a portrait of her short-term daughter-in-law.

Anna Justine Mahler (born June 15, 1904 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary , † June 3, 1988 in London ) was an Austrian sculptor . She was the daughter of the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma Mahler-Werfel .

Life

Anna Mahler with her mother and sister Maria (left), circa 1906.
Anna Mahler with her mother and sister Maria (left), circa 1906.

Mahler's older sister Maria died of diphtheria at the age of four . Her father died when Anna Mahler was seven years old. Her mother Alma Mahler-Werfel, who had a relationship with Walter Gropius at the time of Gustav Mahler's death , became one of the great society ladies in Vienna with close ties to numerous cultural workers in Europe. The mother's salon became one of the centers of intellectual life in Vienna, where Gerhart Hauptmann , Alexander von Zemlinsky , Alban Berg , Bruno Walter , Paul Kammerer and Willem Mengelberg , among others , frequented. Alma became a much sought-after woman, who was adored by many as Mahler's widow, and who increasingly gained the reputation of a femme fatale . However, daughter Anna was mainly a useful servant for the mother, whose schooling was neglected. Anna was already sketching portraits of the visitors in her mother's salon . She witnessed how her mother, after a relationship with the expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka and a marriage with Walter Gropius, entered into another marriage: with Franz Werfel . Oliver Hilmes , biographer of Alma Mahler-Werfel, claims that it was above all Anna's oppressive and sexually charged atmosphere in the house that left Anna lonely and drove her to marry the conductor Rupert Koller , the painter's son , at the age of 16 Broncia Koller-Pinell . The marriage failed after a few months.

In 1923 Anna Mahler moved to Berlin with the composer Ernst Krenek . They married in 1924, the marriage also ended after a year. Anna initially studied painting under Giorgio de Chirico in Rome , but turned to sculpture in 1925.

She was briefly married to Paul Zsolnay , Franz Werfel's publisher, who had also published the letters between her parents. This marriage, from which a daughter emerged, also failed. The daughter Alma Zsolnay (1930-2010) grew up with her father.

As Oliver Hilmes writes, in the first half of the 1930s the politically more left-wing woman had a love affair with the Austrian politician Kurt von Schuschnigg , from 1934 Federal Chancellor and leader of the Fatherland Front . After the death of his wife in a car accident, which Schuschnigg himself had survived with minor injuries, he broke off the relationship with Anna Mahler because he felt the misfortune as God's punishment for his sin .

Half-sister Manon with her parents Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler (1918)

In 1935, her half-sister Manon Gropius died of polio at the age of 18 .

In 1938 Anna Mahler was involved in attempts, so to speak, 5 to 12 (after the Berchtesgaden Agreement of February 12, which sealed the fall of Austria), an understanding between the government / fatherland front and the Austrian Social Democrats who had been persecuted since 1934, in order to create a front to build against Hitler and the National Socialists.

In 1939 Anna Mahler, whose father was of Jewish descent, fled from the Nazis to London. As a member of the Executive Committee of the Austrian Center , she was also involved in her exile in Austria. She married the Russian conductor Anatole Fistoulari , with whom she had another daughter, Marina. After the end of the Second World War , she lived in California from 1950 near her mother and stepfather Franz Werfel. From 1951 she lived with the film editor and screenwriter Albrecht Joseph , who had previously been the (private) secretary of Franz Werfel and Thomas Mann . He said he had already fallen in love with her in Vienna in the 1930s while visiting Anna's mother. After her mother's death in 1964, she inherited the financial means to settle with Joseph in Spoleto , where she was made an honorary citizen. They married in 1970. When she was over 80, she moved to live with her daughter Marina in London and asked Joseph to separate them: she wanted to go about her work alone.

Mahler died in London in 1988 at the age of 84, a few weeks before a large solo exhibition of her works in the Kleiner Festspielhaus Salzburg . She was buried in Highgate Cemetery in north London.

plant

Sculpture Torso in Luisenpark Mannheim
Sculpture La donna che beve in Spoleto

Almost all of Mahler's early work was destroyed in bombing raids on Vienna and Berlin during World War II, with the exception of a portrait of Kurt Schuschnigg , which is now on display in the Army History Museum in Vienna (Room VII - Republic and Dictatorship ). The bust survived the war because a friend of Anna Mahler's camouflaged with an inconspicuous cover had previously brought it to the artist in London.

She was enthusiastic about Auguste Rodin , Aristide Maillol , especially Wilhelm Lehmbruck , but she never changed her style: she only carved figurative objects out of stones, mostly female bodies. Fritz Wotruba , one of the most important Austrian sculptors of the 20th century, gave her lessons and suggestions in loose form.

Her works include a number of (bronze) busts by important artists and musicians of the 20th century, including Arnold Schönberg , Alban Berg , Artur Schnabel , Otto Klemperer , Bruno Walter , Rudolf Serkin , Wilhelm Furtwängler , Victor de Sabata , Carl Zuckmayer , Leo Perutz , Hermann Broch , Franz Werfel , Fritz Wotruba , Fritzi Massary , Julie Andrews , initially modeling the busts with clay balls.

The longed-for public and financial recognition through an order from the University of California (UCLA) in Los Angeles for a "mask tower" did not materialize despite a five meter high design with more than forty masks layered on top of each other.

Awards

Works (excerpt)

  • Portrait head Dr. Kurt Schuschnigg , around 1934, hollow plaster stained black; 40 × 22 × 30 cm, Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Vienna
  • Torso , Luisenpark Mannheim
  • Death mask by Alban Berg

literature

  • Ilse Krumpöck: The sculptures in the Army History Museum. Vienna 2004, p. 97 f.
  • Marlene Streeruwitz : Posterity. A travel report . Novel. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-10-074424-1 .
  • Barbara Weidle, Ursula Seeber (Ed.): Anna Mahler. I am at home in myself. Weidle, Bonn 2004, ISBN 3-931135-79-9 .
  • Oliver Hilmes: widow delusional. The life of the Alma Mahler-Werfel . Siedler, Munich 2006, ISBN 3886807975 .
  • Anna Mahler: her work . Single by Ernst Gombrich . With e. Contribution by Anna Mahler The figure of man in art . Stuttgart, Zurich: Belser 1975 [illustrated book with a biographical part by Albrecht Joseph]

Web links

Commons : Anna Mahler  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Elke Pressler: How to throw a stone into still water - The sculptor Anna Mahler in: dradio.de, Deutschlandfunk, Das Feature, October 20, 2011 Manuscript: Online (October 21, 2011)
  2. ↑ Stefan Weidle : Afterword , in: Albrecht Joseph: Ein Tisch bei Romanoffs. From expressionist theater to western series. Memories . With a post from Stefan Weidle. Mönchengladbach: Juni-Verlag 1991, p. 244
  3. ↑ Franz Willnauer, Marina Mahler-Fistoulari (ed.): Anna Mahler, Sculptures: [for the exhibition of the same name, organized by the Salzburg Festival in cooperation with the Salzburg Regional Collections Rupertinum, which took place from July 27th to August 30th, 1988 in the Kleiner Festspielhaus will be shown]. Salzburg Festival, Salzburg 1988, DNB 921525672 .
  4. ↑ Anna Justine Mahler on findagrave.com
  5. ^ Army History Museum / Military History Institute (ed.): The Army History Museum in the Vienna Arsenal . Verlag Militaria , Vienna 2016, ISBN 978-3-902551-69-6 , p. 138
  6. ↑ Ilse Krumpöck: The images in the Army History Museum. Vienna 2004, p. 114 f.
personal data
SURNAME Mahler, Anna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mahler, Anna Justine (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian sculptor
DATE OF BIRTH June 15, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 3rd June 1988
Place of death London