Masterpieces Of Vienna (3 of 38)

Masterpieces Of Vienna

He announced that he wanted to break every bone in Kokoschka's body, seeing him as a dangerous rebel, trying to undermine the established order and the bourgeois culture of the time.
This Viennese bourgeois society was Alma Mahler's home turf.
She was a charismatic young woman, and something of a celebrity.
She was the eternal feminine.
She was the most feminine, soft, beautiful person, who was able to give men of great talent the feeling that she knew them down to the very core of their souls.

On top of that, she could create an electric shock across a crowded room if she looked at a man.
She was a compulsive flirt, she simply couldn't help it.
Young Alma's introduction to the pleasures of the flesh began when she was kissed by Vienna's greatest artist of the time, Gustav Klimt.
She was warned off the notorious womaniser for the very good reason that he probably had syphilis.
But Alma was never short of admirers and at the age of 22, she married the celebrated composer and conductor, Gustav Mahler, 20 years her senior and the first of her three husbands.
She did draw men like a magnet, even when she was married to Mahler.
She had, well, at least one affair with the architect Walter Gropius.
So much so that Mahler, who found out about this at a certain point, sought the advice, and no doubt consolation, from none other than Sigmund Freud.