Neue
Galerie New York, Upper East Side Until
Jun 8 2020
Dora
Kallmus (1881–1963), better known as Madame d’Ora, was an unusual woman for her
time with a spectacular career as one of the leading photographic portraitists
of the early 20th century. This exhibition, the largest museum retrospective on
the Austrian photographer to date in the United States, will present the
different periods of her life, from her early upbringing as the daughter of
Jewish intellectuals in Vienna, to her days as a premier society photographer,
through her survival during the Holocaust. Forging a path in a field that was
dominated by men, d’Ora enjoyed an illustrious 50-year career, from 1907 until
1957. The show will include more than 100 examples of her work, which is
distinguished for its extreme elegance, and utter depth and darkness.
Born into a
privileged background and coming of age amidst the creative and intellectual
atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Kallmus was extremely well cultured. At age
23 while on a trip to the Côte d’Azur, she purchased her first camera, a Kodak
box camera. She was the first woman photographer in Vienna to open her own
studio and in May 1906, she was listed in the commercial register as a
photographer for the first time. Self-styled simply as d’Ora, she initially
took portraits of friends and members from her social circle. In the autumn of
1909, an exhibition of her work received a lively response from the press.
Critics both praised the artistic style of her portraits and emphasized the
prominent individuals who streamed in to view the show.
Over the
course of her lifetime, d’Ora turned her lens on many artists, including
Josephine Baker, Colette, Gustav Klimt, Tamara de Lempicka, and Pablo Picasso,
among others. Alongside these commissions, she also photographed members of the
Habsburg family and Viennese aristocracy, the Rothschild family, and other
prominent cultural figures and politicians. D’Ora had close ties to avant-garde
artistic circles and captured members of the Expressionist dance movement with
her lens, including Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste. Fashion and glamor
subjects were another important mainstay of her business. She regularly
photographed Wiener Werkstätte fashion models and the designer Emilie Flöge of
the Schwestern Flöge salon wearing artistic reform dresses. When d’Ora moved to
Paris in 1925, she shifted her focus to fashion, covering the couture scene and
leading lights of the period until 1940. She befriended key figures, such as
the French milliner Madame Agnès and the Spanish designer Cristóbal Balenciaga,
as well as the top fashion magazine editors of the day. She also helped create
and sustain glamorous images for a variety of celebrities, including Cecil
Beaton, Maurice Chevalier, and Colette.
When the
Nazis seized control of Paris in 1940, she was forced to close her studio and
flee. She spent the war years in a semi-underground existence living in Ardèche
in the southeast of France. Her sister Anna Kallmus, along with other family
and friends, died in the Chełmno concentration camp. After World War II, d’Ora
returned to Paris, profoundly affected by personal losses. While she lacked an
elegant studio in Paris, d’Ora’s lasting connections to wealthy clients
remained and many of them returned to her. While she accepted portrait
commissions, mostly for financial stability, she also pushed into new,
sometimes darker directions. Around 1948, she embarked on an astonishing series
of photographs in displaced persons or refugee camps, which was commissioned by
the United Nations. From around 1949 to 1958, d’Ora worked on a project, which
she called “my big final work.” She visited numerous slaughterhouses in Paris,
and amid the pools of blood and deathly screams, she stood in an elegant suit
and a hat photographing the butchered animals hundreds of times.
This
exhibition spans the breadth of d’Ora’s oeuvre and shows her remarkable ability
to capture both the epitome of beauty and the pathos of death and suffering. In
1958, on the occasion of the last exhibition of her work held during her
lifetime, Jean Cocteau commented on d’Ora’s versatility remarking: “Madame
d’Ora, fanned by the wing of genius, strolls in a labyrinth whose minotaur goes
from the Dolly Sisters to the terrible bestiary of the slaughterhouses—where
this ageless woman, more lucid than any young man, brushes the killers aside
with a gesture and sets up her camera in their stead in front of the daily
sacrifice of our carnivorous cult.”
