Anna Mahler

Personal

Vocation

Notable

Family

Austrian sculptor, awarded the Grand Prix in Paris in 1937. As well as sculpting successfully in stone, Anna Mahler produced bronze heads of many of the musical giants of the 20th century including Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, Artur Schnabel, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Rudolf Serkin and Eileen Joyce. Anna Mahler was the second child of the composer Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma Schindler. They nicknamed her 'Gucki' on account of her big blue eyes (Gucken is German for 'peek' or 'peep'). Her childhood was spent in the shadow of her mother’s love affairs and famous salon. Anna also suffered the loss of her older sister Maria Mahler (1902–1907) who died of scarlet fever when Anna was two—and her father, who died when she was six. The aftermath of both tragedies coincided with her mother's love affair with the German architect Walter Gropius and her stormy relationship with the Austrian Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka. Alma Mahler's second marriage to Gropius, however, provided some semblance of family life during Anna’s adolescence—as well as a half-sister, Manon Gropius (1916–1935). Anna fell in love with a rising young conductor, Rupert Koller, and married him on 2 November 1920, when she was only sixteen, but the marriage ended within months. Soon after, Anna moved to Berlin to study art. While there, she fell in love with Ernst Krenek the composer, and married him on 15 January 1924, but that marriage too failed, and she left Krenek for good in November 1924. She married the publisher Paul Zsolnay on 2 December 1929, and they had a daughter, Alma (5 November 1930 – 15 November 2010). The couple divorced in 1934. April 1939 found her living in Hampstead in London, having fled Nazi Austria. On 3 March 1943 she married the conductor Anatole Fistoulari with whom she had another daughter, Marina (born 1 August 1943). After the War, she travelled to California and lived there for some years. Her marriage to Fistoulari was dissolved around 1956. Around 1970 she married her fifth husband, Albrecht Joseph (1901–1991), a Hollywood film editor and writer of screenplays. They later separated. She died on 3 June 1988, aged 83, in Hampstead, London. Link to Wikipedia biography