The Essen Museum Folkwang illuminates the Amour Fou between Alma Mahler and Oskar Kokoschka, one of the artistically productive, but also the most obsessive love relationships of the 20th century.
Jealousy played a very big role in Alma Mahler’s life. Not because this infamous, infamous of all muses themselves would have been particularly jealous, but because the numerous men in their lives with Alma’s parallee education did not really cope. Jealousy is also the reason why only six of those seven subjects exist today that Oskar Kokoschka painted for her between 1912 and 1914 and she – always for her birthday on August 31st and Christmas – revered her as a “love letter in visual language”. Alma’s later husband Walter Gropius threw the seventh in the fireplace in a jealousy attack.