Anna Mahler

Anna Mahler - Unfulfilled longing in the shadow of her mother

Anna Mahler was born in Vienna on 15 June 1904 to the composer Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma Mahler-Werfel. At the age of four, she witnessed the death of her older sister Maria from diphtheria and lost her father at the age of seven. Alma Mahler-Werfel's dissolute life had a negative effect on her daughter, driving Anna into an unhappy marriage lasting only a few months with the conductor Rupert Koller. Anna greatly admired Koller’s mother, the Viennese painter Broncia Koller-Pinell, and regarded her as a surrogate mother. Anna Mahler's next loves were the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, in whose clear structure and composition she found the peace and security she was missing in her life, and the composer Ernst Krenek, whom she married in 1924. She herself became a literary figure at the age of 17 when Oskar Kokoschka featured her as the wise counsellor Psyche in his expressionist play Orpheus and Eurydice, a disguised portrayal of his relationship with Alma Mahler-Werfel, and asked Ernst Krenek to set it to music. Anna Mahler herself produced a piano reduction, but after less than a year, this second marriage was also at an end. 

As an artist, Anna Mahler remained an outsider

Anna Mahler began studying the painting of Giorgio de Chirico in Rome, but soon turned to sculpture. She entered into a third, also short-lived marriage with Paul Zsolnay, the publisher of her stepfather Franz Werfel, and their daughter Alma Zsonay grew up with her father. In Vienna, Anna Mahler's studio became a meeting place for the great artistic personalities of the time: Artur Schnabel, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Hermann Broch, Carl Zuckmayr, Rudolf Serkin and Bruno Walter were among the visitors who had themselves modelled by Anna Mahler. She received sporadic instruction in sculpture from Fritz Wotruba, the great Austrian master of sculpture of the time; however, Mahler saw her artistic role models in Aristide Maillol and Auguste Rodin, but particularly in Wilhelm Lehmbruck. She cultivated the same style throughout her life, chiselled her mostly female figures exclusively from stone and never left this figurative path. New art trends passed her by, and as an artist, she remained an outsider all her life.

A futile struggle for public recognition

As the daughter of a Jewish father, Anna Mahler had to flee from the National Socialists to London after the ‘Anschluss’ (annexation) of Austria to Nazi Germany in 1939. There she became involved in the Austrian exile movement and married the Russian conductor Anatole Fistoulari, with whom she had another daughter, Marina. As an artist, she suffered a severe loss in exile: Almost all of her early work was destroyed in Allied bombing raids on Berlin and Vienna during the Second World War; only a portrait head of the Austrian politician Kurt Schuschnigg, with whom she had an affair in the mid-1930s, survived because a friend of hers had smuggled it to London in time. Despite a few minor successes, the artist struggled in vain her whole life for the public recognition she longed for. Finally, she attempted to have a five-meter mask tower erected in Los Angeles, but this was never realised.

Anna Mahler died in London on 3 June 1988.