Diane Silverthorne PhD, Art Historian and BelSoc Committee Member, gave a fascinating talk at the 2026 BelSoc AGM,
'Sculptor Anna Mahler: Vienna - London - Belsize Park'.
Below is a summary of the talk.
I was drawn to publish on the elusive figure of sculptor Anna Mahler (1904-1988), daughter of the world-famous composer Gustav Mahler, when I came across many passing references in biographies of her more celebrated mother, Alma. When I found out that she lived in a make-shift studio on the corner of Fellows Road and Merton Rise, just a few steps from my home, the project became irresistible.
Born in 1904 into the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, sculptor Anna Mahler experienced many of Europe’s traumatic events. She initially struggled to find her metier but by the early 1930s, she was working a professional sculptor in her own studio in the centre of Vienna. As a sign of her increasing eminence, she was invited to exhibit an eight-foot high ‘Standing Figure of a Woman’, also known as Venus for the Austrian Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Fair. The work was awarded the Grand Prix.
A year later, within days of the Anschluss (absorption of Austria into Nazi Germany), she fled Vienna through Europe to London. Her Vienna studio was later bombed and her works destroyed. Here, she became a prominent figure within Austrian cultural refugees circles which included the artist Oskar Kokoschka; writer Elias Canetti, the painter Marie-Louise Motesiczky and psycho-analyst Anna Freud. Her portrait busts of eminent musical figures were included in exhibitions instigated by the Free German League of Culture and the International Artists’ Association. In 1951 one of her reclining figures in stone, a life-time pre-occupation, was displayed on the South Bank at the Festival of Britain. She then left London for Los Angeles where she created ‘the Tower of Masks’, a monumental sculpture for the UCLA.
She visited London often throughout her life and died here in 1988, just weeks before a major retrospective at the Salzburg Festival. She is buried in Highgate East Ceremony, her grave guarded by ‘Vision’, one of her mysterious standing figures in bronze.
See ‘Pioneering Women Sculptors’, Sculpture Journal, https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/toc/sj/32/1
