Sculptor's Daughter



Anna was educated by tutors and also enjoyed the attention of her mother's friends, which included many of the important artistic figures in music, the visual arts, and literature. As the daughter of the legendary Gustav Mahler, Anna was expected to have a musical career. However, this never materialized. The Sculptor finds Sekiro left for dead in a field near the Ashina Reservoir, and nurses him back to health, before providing him with a Prosthetic Arm capable of equipping Prosthetic Tools. Sculptor Information. The Sculptor is a mysterious, taciturn old man of advanced age who is missing his left arm.

Anna Mahler by Broncia Koller-Pinell, 1921
Born
15 June 1904
Vienna, Austria
Died3 June 1988 (aged 83)
Resting placeHighgate Cemetery, London
NationalityAustrian
Known forSculpture
Spouse(s)
(m. 1920⁠–⁠1921)​

(m. 1924⁠–⁠1924)​

(m. 1929⁠–⁠1934)​

(m. 1943⁠–⁠1956)​

(m.1970⁠–⁠1988)​

Anna Justine Mahler (Vienna, Austria, 15 June 1904 – Hampstead, London, England, 3 June 1988) was an Austriansculptor.

Early life[edit]

Anna Mahler (at right) with her older sister Maria and her mother, carte de visite cabinet card photo circa 1906

Born in Vienna, 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 three—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 young half-sister, Manon Gropius (1916–1935).

Anna was educated by tutors and also enjoyed the attention of her mother's friends, which included many of the important artistic figures in music, the visual arts, and literature. As the daughter of the legendary Gustav Mahler, Anna was expected to have a musical career. However, this never materialized. Rather than becoming a professional musician, Anna fell in love with one.

Personal life[edit]

At the age of 16, Anna fell in love with a rising young conductor, Rupert Koller. They were married on 2 November 1920. Their marriage ended within months.

Soon after, Anna moved to Berlin to study art. While there, she fell in love with Ernst Krenek, the composer, who later was asked by Alma to produce a neat copy of two movements from the draft of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony. Anna married him on 15 January 1924, while she was still 19 years old. Like her first marriage, this second marriage failed within months. She left Krenek for good in November 1924. During this time, Krenek was completing his Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 29. The Australian violinist Alma Moodie assisted Krenek with getting financial assistance from her Swiss patron Werner Reinhart, at whose instigation Krenek and Mahler were living in Zürich, and, in gratitude, Krenek dedicated the concerto to Moodie, who premiered it on 5 January 1925, in Dessau. Krenek’s divorce from Anna Mahler became final a few days after the premiere [1] which Krenek did not attend.[2]

Next, Anna married the publisher Paul Zsolnay on 2 December 1929, when she was 25. They had a daughter, Alma (5 November 1930 – 15 November 2010). The couple divorced in 1934, after five years.

Painter

Alma fled Nazi Austria after anschluss in March 1938. By April 1939 she was living in Hampstead in London and was advertising in the newspaper for pupils.

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 without Fistoulari, to whom she was still married. She lived there for some years. Anna appeared on 'You Bet Your Life, both the 2 January 1952 radio show, and the 3 January 1952 TV show. Her marriage to Fistoulari was dissolved around 1956[vague].

Around 1970 she married her fifth husband, Albrecht Joseph (1901–1991), a Hollywood film editor and writer of screenplays. Mahler once said[citation needed] that she had found true love with her last husband but had left him at the age of seventy-five in order that they might both progress, since they spent too much time looking after each other.

After her mother died in 1964, Anna, now financially independent, returned to London for a while before finally deciding to live in Spoleto in Italy in 1969. Sign in 1password. In 1988 she died in Hampstead, while visiting her daughter Marina there. She is buried at Highgate Cemetery.

Daughter

Artistic career[edit]

Sculptor's Daughter A Childhood Memoir

Mahler's grave in Highgate Cemetery

Anna Mahler's exposure to the visual arts began early when she would visit Oskar Kokoschka's studio. She was also a model for her mother-in-law, the painter Broncia Koller-Pinell. After her divorce, Anna studied art and painting on and off in Berlin, Rome, and Paris throughout the 1920s. At the age of twenty-six, she discovered that sculpture was the medium in which she could best express her creativity. Having taken lessons in sculpting in Vienna in 1930 from Fritz Wotruba, she became an established sculptor there, and was 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.[3]

References[edit]

Footnotes[edit]

  1. ^Answers.com
  2. ^Kay Dreyfus, Alma Moodie and the Landscape of Giftedness
  3. ^Richard Davis, Eileen Joyce: A Portrait.

Sources[edit]

  • Anna Mahler. Ich bin in mir selbst zu Hause. Ed. by Barbara Weidle and Ursula Seeber (Weidle Verlag, Bonn, 2004)
  • Obituary, The Times, 6 June 1988
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anna_Mahler&oldid=1012306217'

“Margaret . . thinks she will stick to portraiture and be a specialist in portrait busts.” (Daniel Chester French letter to Mrs. Albert Miller. September 24, 1921)

One of my tasks as I continue to work on the Daniel Chester French Chesterwood Studio Reinterpretation Project is to locate images of Daniel Chester French’s daughter, Margaret French Cresson, in her father’s studio. The only child of the sculptor and his wife, Mary Adams French, Margaret spent many hours in the studio. I have come across photographs of her as a young girl, sitting in the reception room, frolicking in the gardens, and posing for her father. At five years old, Margaret was the model for the angels in the Clark Memorial (Forest Hill Cemetery, Massachusetts; plaster bas-relief maquettes on view in the studio), and as a young woman, she posed for Evangeline, one of the six poetic characters incorporated into the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Memorial (1912–14, Cambridge, Massachusetts).

Modeling for Evangeline, the Longfellow Memorial

As an adult, Margaret followed in her father’s rather large footsteps, and became a sculptor in her own right. This 1915 photograph (see below) shows her working on a portrait headin the Chesterwood studio, the southeast corner of the room clearly visible. It is exciting detective work to compare the 1915 photograph with a recent one: many of the objects on the shelves today were already in place in 1915. Objects which have not moved in almost one hundred years include the plaster model of St. Paul (1905, Minnesota State Capitol), the plaster head of Alma Mater (1902), and the Standing Baby plaster cast (1911), a component of the marble statue at the Old Federal Building in Cleveland. Above the shelf is a lion’s head mounted to a wooden beam, and tucked below the shelf are round and square bas-reliefs. Down the wooden beam at the middle of the shelf, a portrait head rests upon a bracket, and another lion head watches over the studio. Tucked into the corner are an architectural fragment, a relief portrait, and a boy’s head. There are also some objects which appear in the photograph but are no longer in the studio today, including a plaster Alma Mater, at the far left, a Greek Tragedy mask, and a framed set of photographs of equestrian monuments (which, in an interesting side-note, appears in a 1900 photograph of French’s New York studio).

Margaret French Cresson at work in the studio, 1915

Southeast corner of the Chesterwood Studio (photograph by Dana Pilson)

The Daniel Chester French material also includes some of French’s personal correspondence. Occasionally, letters relate to photographs, and putting “two and two” together is a thrilling component of this project. On August 27, 1916, French wrote with father’s pride to his close friend, the singer Rosalie Miller, “Margaret has just finished a study of a girl’s head which she is going to send to the Stockbridge exhibition — with my consent and approval. I want you to see it.” This is probably the work she is sculpting in the photograph above left.

Another image from about the same period shows Margaret, in fancy dress and sun hat, working side-by-side with her father who is also nattily attired in dress-shirt and bow tie (see below left). Margaret works on a portrait bust while her father seems to put finishing touches on Brooklyn (1913–16); a smaller-scale reduction of the Brooklyn is nearby. A related photograph (below right), dated on the back as “about 1926” but probably closer to 1915, also shows the two sculptors in the studio. French again poses next to Brooklyn and Margaret stands by a portrait head, a different one, however, from the work in the previous image. In this snapshot, Margaret has donned an artist smock which complements her smart hat and long skirt. Nothing of the studio except the back wall and door is visible.

Margaret French Cresson and Daniel Chester French at work

Margaret French Cresson and Daniel Chester French in the studio, 'about 1926'

Also in the archives is a holiday card from 1939, showing Margaret in the studio eight years after French’s death. She stands next to the final plaster model of Abraham Lincoln, the base adorned with a large wreath, clay pots on the floor similar to those currently in the studio. Behind her: the plaster working model of Immortal Love (1920), what appears to be one of the figures from the Samuel F. Dupont Memorial Fountain (Washington, D.C., 1917–21), and a large relief, possibly the full-size plaster model for Knowledge and Wisdom (Boston Public Library Doors, 1894–1904). Upon close examination of the photograph, I realized that the image must have been flopped. I created a mirror image, and then voilà! It finally made sense. The light coming in from the northern overhead sky-light windows now casts correct shadows upon the wreath, Margaret wears her watch on her left hand (in the photographs of her sculpting, it appears she is indeed a “righty”) and the Boston Public Library doors are to the left of Lincoln, where they are today.

Margaret French Cresson's holiday card, 1939, as printed

More Margaret French Cresson material awaits my examination, and I look forward to getting to know her better not only as French’s daughter and the eventual inheritor, caretaker, and donator of Chesterwood, but as a talented sculptor and gifted artist.

Painter's Daughters Chasing A Butterfly

All photographs and images are courtesy Chapin Library, Williams College, Gift of the National Trust for Historic Preservation/Chesterwood, a National Trust Historic Site, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, except where noted