The Artist's Wife

by Max Phillips

"At the turn of the century, she was "the most beautiful girl in Vienna," intelligent, aristocratic, and adored. Her father was a landscape painter and an Imperial favorite. She herself stood at the threshold of a promising musical career. Her childhood dream had been to follow her Papi's footsteps in the impersonal pursuit of Art. Instead, Alma Mahler turned her considerable talents to becoming a freelance muse.". "Passionate, fickle, brilliant, and alcoholic, she made a series of dazzling conquests, including the composer Gustav Mahler; the architect Walter Gropius, who went on to found the Bauhaus; the author Franz Werfel, who wrote The Song of Bernadette; and the revolutionary painters Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka.". "In The Artist's Wife, Alma Mahler tells her own story, after death and without apology: her childhood in the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire, her climb to the heights of Central Europe's beau monde, the struggles of her three marriages, the deaths of three of he