Alma Mahler-Werfel

1911 - 1919

After Mahler´s death, Alma´s second marriage, in 1915, was to Walter Gropius. During all the years in which he was forming the Bauhaus movement and revolutionizing the world of design, she remained at his side. Yet neither did this liaison endure. After she had availed herself of his »precious Aryan seed«, from which the beautiful, short-lived Manon was born - a pure angel, to whom Alban Berg created a memorial with his Violin Concerto - the once so passionate relationshipended in agony and alienation.

Alma Mahler

This relationship was however already overshadowed by Alma´s excessive relationship with the enfant terrible of the Viennese art scene, the young painter Oskar Kokoschka. In the seething cultural environment of Vienna before the First World War, Kokoschka aroused a furious sensation both through the uncompromising nature of his painting and also as the author of two theatre plays about sex and violence. In 1912 he began a passionate affair with Alma Mahler which lasted for three years. The two lived and travelled together, and when they were not making love, Kokoschka painted her. In 1913, Kokoschka created an allegorical representation of their love affair, »The Bride of the Wind«, a vivid image in which the two lovers are whirling around the space. Even on Alma´s seventieth birthday, Kokoschka referred to his immortal loved one as a »wild creature« and was convinced that they were »united in the ´Bride of the Wind´ forever«.

Kokoschka was the ace of hearts among Alma´s four trump cards. Nevertheless she saw herself forced to break up with him since Kokoschka had come more dangerously close to her inner being than any of her men before, or indeed after; until the end of life she refused to see him again. Apart from the countless paintings and drawings which testify to this anguished relationship, there was also a saucy life-size doll, a faithful reproduction of Alma down to the most intimate details, which Kokoschka had made in 1915 in order to console himself for the loss of his loved one. The doll has not been preserved, for it was destroyed in an extravagant orgy in Dresden, in 1919.