Anna Mahler

Anna Mahler (Vienna, 1904 - London, 1988) was an Austrian sculptor, the daughter of the composer Gustav Mahler and Alma Mahler. Although she grew up in one of the most brilliant cultural circles of early twentieth-century Vienna, she built her own reputation through works in stone and bronze, above all portrait heads of major musicians of the century.

Her childhood was shaped by the death of her sister Maria in 1907 and, when Anna was only six, by the death of her father in 1911. Her mother later married the architect Walter Gropius and then Franz Werfel, and the family salon drew figures such as Alban Berg and Bruno Walter. Anna was already making portraits of its visitors as a young woman. Her personal life was unsettled: in 1920 she married the conductor Rupert Koller, and later the composer Ernst Krenek, from whom she divorced in 1924.

After this period she turned seriously to art. She studied under Giorgio de Chirico in Rome and spent a winter in Paris devoted to painting, but she never felt at ease with colour, and her images looked more like two-dimensional reliefs than paintings. She then studied sculpture in Vienna under Fritz Wotruba and settled there as a sculptor.

Her best-known work is Nude Woman, shown at the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris, where it won the exhibition's Grand Prize. Her other works include Torso, in Mannheim's Luisenpark, and Vision, a portrait of her daughter Marina covering her face with both hands. She also made bronze heads of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Artur Schnabel, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Rudolf Serkin and Eileen Joyce.

In 1939 she fled the Nazis to London, where she opened a small sculpture studio, and after the war she lived in Los Angeles. She died in London in 1988 while visiting her daughter. Her grave in Highgate Cemetery bears a bronze reproduction of Vision. Her legacy is associated above all with her portraits of musicians.