Love Letters in Pictures

Some love affairs, like stately quin-queremes, sail serenely on for decades. Others founder in tempests of selfishness, or rocks of jealousy. In her 1958 memoirs, Vienna's Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel recalled her three-year affair with Painter Oskar Kokoschka as "one fierce battle of love. Never before had I tasted so much tension, so much hell, so much paradise." Never after ward, she might have added, did she in spire so many fascinating and often memorable works of art.

Among them were seven intricately painted swanskin fans that Kokoschka decorated for her between 1912 and 1914, partly as gifts and partly because he had chosen the illumination of fans as a special project for Vienna's famous arts and crafts school, the Wiener Werkstatte, where he worked as an apprentice and later as a teacher. Al though one was destroyed, the remaining six were acquired by Hamburg's Museum of Arts and Crafts in West Germany. Their jaded elegance evokes the Vienna of the Habsburgs, Freud and Franz Lehar, though they would have rocked the city at the time.

Handsome but Coarse. Oskar Kokoschka then was a young, lean, in tense nobody. He was one of the radical group of "Expressionists" who sought, with staccato rhythms and garish colors, to "express" on their canvases tormented moods and fantasies rather than to portray fashionable, naturalistic everyday scenes. "Crazy Kokoschka," his critics called him. Archduke Francis Ferdinand, who was later to die at Sarajevo, grumbled that "this fellow's bones ought to be broken."

Fortunately, Alma's stepfather, a Viennese landscape artist named Carl Moll, was more perceptive. He brought Kokoschka home to paint -- and cheer up --his beautiful stepdaughter, recently be reaved of her first husband, the Com poser Gustav Mahler. Alma's verdict: "A handsome figure, but disturbingly coarse." After the first sketching ses sion, Kokoschka stood up, embraced her and then dashed out of the room. A few hours later, she received the first of many proposals from him.

The Lady and the Dragon. Alma was willing to dally but not to marry. To gether the lovers voyaged to Italy; to gether they braved the snakelike tongues of the gossips in Vienna. Kokoschka decorated the wall over the fireplace of Alma's country house in the Austrian Alps with a mural showing Alma rising from the flames. "I consider I worked very well during that time," the artist recalled last week at Ville neuve in Switzerland, where at 83 he now lives and paints.

Kokoschka's best work from that period is Tempest, an oil that depicts the lovers swept up in a swirling sea of waves. "It is my most beautiful portrait," Alma wrote, noting that it showed her "trustfully clinging to him, expecting all help from him who, despotic of face, radiating energy, calms the mountainous waves." The theme of Tempest is repeated in miniature form--as the entwined lovers on the Bay of Naples--on one of the seven swanskin fans. On another, Kokoschka inscribed the Alma of the Alpine mural, adding himself as St. George fighting the dragon. Today Kokoschka refers to the fans as "love letters in pictures."

Actually, Alma appears to have been no helpless, trusting flower but a full-blooded coquette who ultimately found Oskar too demanding. When Kokoschka marched off to war in 1914, even he felt a certain sense of relief. ("It was very exhausting," he was later heard to say. "I had to climb into her room at night.") By the time he came back, Alma had become the wife of Walter Gropius, the German architect, whom she subsequently divorced in order to live with and eventually marry Franz Werfel, the novelist.

For Oskar, the memory lingered on. Four years after their separation, Alma heard that he had acquired a life-size doll that was painted to look like her. She reported: "The doll always lay on the sofa. For days on end Kokoschka would lock himself in and talk to no one but the doll. At last, he had me where he wanted me: helpless in his hand, a docile, mechanical tool." But she too remembered, and kept the fans always with her as affectionate mementos until her death in Manhattan in 1964 at the age of 85.

And the lost seventh fan? One day, in a fit of jealous rage, Gropius threw it into the fireplace.

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