Gucki

Some time ago I went to Highgate Cemetery and was immediately drawn to a figure of a woman wearing a peplos, covering her face with her hands in a gesture of immense but quiet grief. I went to find out who was buried under this fine work of art and discovered that is was Anna Mahler who was also the creator of the sculpture.

Anna Mahler was the daughter of the composer Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma. As a child, Anna was known as 'Gucki' because of her big blue eyes which observed the world so intensely and later helped her to become a talented sculptor.

I have long been interested in Gustav Mahler's music and Alma Mahler's extraordinary life, immortalised in Tom Lehrer's famous tune: "Alma tell us/all modern women are jealous/ which of your magical wands/ got you Gustav and Walter and Franz" The Walter is of course Gropius of the Bauhaus and Franz Werfel the writer. But those were just the one's Alma married. First there was Gustav Klimt, and then a tempestuous love affair with Oskar Kokoshka who painted the famous "Windsbraut" to express his feelings about Alma. So this was the world Anna grew up in. I wanted to paint her, showing her penetrating blue eyes, using techniques gleaned from Klimt and Kokoshka, their particular way of using many, almost nerveously sensitive brush strokes and a sulphorous yellow overlaid with a diaphanous white and skin tones which seem almost bruised, again to accentuate the acute sensitivity of the sitter. Of course the painting was done postumously but is based on a wonderful old photograph I found in a book about Franz Werfel. In the picture Anna looks out rather sternly, but at the same time with an otherworldly fragility, which again seems to be sured up by the somewhat utilitarian Bauhaus style blouse. So here is Anna, the keen observer who grew up in Gustav Mahler's Vienna, witnessed the birth of modernism first hand and ended her days in Hampstead in 1988. If you find yourself in Highgate, go and say hello to Gucki.