Werner Alvo Konstantin August von Alvensleben

Born:  1889 in Kassell, Germany.

Died:  1962 in Bioggio, Switzerland.

Werner Alvo Konstantin August von Alvensleben was born to a noble Prussian family at Kassel in 1889. Studying law and economics in Geneva, Munich, Berlin and Marburg, he collapsed from tuberculosis before his final exams, spending eight years recovering in Switzerland. Unfit for military service in World War One, he worked for the Red Cross in Hessen. After the war, Alvo craved the free life of a painter. Inheriting a fortune from Generals Gustav and Konstantin von Alvensleben Eichenbarlaben, he had exhibitions and published his poetry.

In 1923, in the Swiss village of Porza, Alvo shared his social and artistic visions with Arthur Bryks (b. 1894, Poland), a painter, and Swiss-Italian sculptor Mario Bernasconi (1889-1963). Between 1927 and 1929, the 'Porza Association' grew from a dream into an international movement to help intellectually independent, creative people, establishing non-profit offices and galleries across Europe (the Paris gallery was represented by industrial designed Jacques Vienot, 1893-1959, for Porza's last exhibition in 1939, before the Nazis invaded).

Aleister Crowley was certainly intellectually independent and creative, and with a brief like that, it is not surprising von Alvensleben came under Nazi scrutiny, even as inflation depressed his fortune. The Nazis seized Alvo's mother's home in Darmstadt. Stored at a depot, his furniture, library, archives and images would be destroyed by an American bomb during Word War Two. Perhaps some of Crowley's lost Berlin paintings were obliterated there.

Alvo took Swiss nationality. Fortunes dwindling, he eventually moved with his wife, the Baroness Gisela von Bothmer (1893-1982), to a rented house and plot in Torricella, Italy. There they raised a large, happy family by selling berries, flowers and vegetables. Kindly gentleman Alvo died in Bioggio on the Swiss side of the border with Italy in 1962.