VIENNA.- With the exhibition “Make Me Beautiful, Madame d’Ora!” the Leopold Museum is showing the first comprehensive presentation in Austria for 35 years on the oeuvre of the extraordinary photographic pioneer Dora Kallmus (1881-1963). Under her artist’s name d’Ora, Kallmus became internationally successful. At the Atelier d’Ora, the luminaries of art and fashion, of the aristocracy and politics of the 20th century were captured on camera. Her oeuvre spans the period of 1907 to 1957. In 1907 Dora Kallmus was one of the first women to open a photographic studio in Vienna. Within only a few months, the Atelier d’Ora had established itself as the best studio for artistic portraits in the Imperial city. Her photographs, which captivate with their elegance and flamboyance, were widely disseminated through numerous magazines in Austria and abroad. In 1923 d’Ora accepted an offer from the French fashion magazine L’Officiel. She left Vienna and moved to Paris, which would become the center of her personal and professional life from 1925. She received countless commissions from fashion and lifestyle magazines, which only started to abate from the mid-1930s when the political situation across Europe became increasingly precarious. When Nazi troops marched into Paris in June 1940, d’Ora sold her studio. For years, the photographer had to hide from German occupying forces in the French mountains. Living in constant fear, she survived the persecution. When France was liberated, d’Ora returned to Paris. Having narrowly escaped death, she focused her at once sharp and emphatic gaze after the War on refugee camps in Vienna and Salzburg and on the meat stock of the Parisian abbatoirs.

“D’Ora’s oeuvre traces a unique arc from the representation of the last Austrian monarch, via the glamour of the Paris fashion world in the 1920s and 30s, to a Europe entirely changed after the War.” --Monika Faber, curator of the exhibition

THE EXHIBITION
More than 330 photographs by d’Ora illustrate the artistic spectrum of “Madame d’Ora”. The elaborate exhibition conceived by Walter Kirpicsenko focuses on three different aspects in d’Ora’s work.

1 R1 X-RAYING OF THE SOUL
“In our era, which counts the right to a personality amongst its highest and most noble achievements, which knows nothing more desirable than ‘letting loose’, photography has become almost a psychological tool, an X-raying of the soul…” From the review of a d’Ora exhibition, Wiener Salonblatt, 1915

Dora Kallmus, or “Fräulein d’Ora”, as she was referred to in the numerous reports on her first activities, wanted not simply to open up a portrait studio but to “become fashionable”. To that end, she completed an internship in 1907 at the most elegant Berlin studio and sought an introduction into current “artistic” portrait photography. Her father’s network within Jewish-liberal Viennese society – which included musicians and painters, journalists, doctors and lawyers, bankers and industrialists, as well as their wives and daughters – helped her to quickly acquire her first commissions. Her empathy and her skill in arranging clothing and accessories were appreciated by ladies of the aristocracy, actresses and fashion designers alike. Thanks to ingenious lighting and precise retouching, the writer, composer and salonnière Alma Mahler, the artist Mileva Roller, Archduchess Zita – the later Empress of Austria – and the dancer Grete Wiesenthal appeared more elegant in d’Ora’s photographs than in front of their mirrors. The founder of the Secession Gustav Klimt, the composer Alban Berg and the writer Arthur Schnitzler frequented her studio along with the high aristocracy photographed by her on the occasion of the coronation of Emperor Charles as King of Hungary in 1916 in traditional ceremonial dress.

Original dresses from Vienna’s most sophisticated Couture house Zwieback, the Wiener Werkstätte and the Salon Flöge emphasize the picture of viennese society at the end of the Jugendstil era.

2 PARIS HAUTE COUTURE AND INTERNATIONAL STARS OF STAGE AND FILM
During her time in Paris, d’Ora created tens of thousands of fashion photographs. Her studio was always bursting with the latest creations by the most renowned fashion designers, from Lanvin, via Chanel to Balenciaga. D’Ora photographed them before they were shown at the fashion shows for the magazine L’Officiel de la Couture which was reserved for specialized trade. She also successfully sold these photographs via international press agencies to fashion and lifestyle magazines all over Europe. While some couture houses preferred certain mannequins, it was often stars like Anna Pavlova, Eva Rubinstein or Josephine Baker who modeled the creations. Accommodating the new, more glamorous than elegant “image” of her models, d’Ora developed a novel, smooth and glittering style after moving to Paris, with which she portrayed even eccentric poses in a flattering light.

French, German, Austrian and Italian original magazines with cover designs, illustrations and texts by d’ora supplement the original photographs which hail primarily from the collections of international press agencies (Ullstein, Berlin; Schostal, Vienna).

3 THE POST-WAR YEARS: NEW BEGINNING AND NEW THEMES
In 1940, after the Nazis had occupied Paris, d’Ora was forced to sell her studio. In 1942 she fled to the small mountain village of Lalouvesc, south of Lyon. There, she took up writing again, which was a constant in her life. She wrote two extensive manuscripts – an autobiographical one about an unhappy love story and one on various photographic themes – as well as diary entries and scattered notes. In late 1945 d’Ora took up her work in Paris again. Rather than running an elegant studio, she now photographed the rich and beautiful, from the Rothschilds to the Emperor of Vietnam, at their villas between Biarritz and the Côte d’Azur. Many of her artist friends remained loyal to the photographer, for instance Maurice Chevalier, with whom she realized a book project in 1954.

In 1946 and 1948 d’Ora visited Austria. Having narrowly escaped death and keenly mourning the loss of her sister Anna in a concentration camp, the portraitist of society focused her analytical and emphatic gaze on occupants of refugee camps in Vienna and Salzburg. Already during her escape from the Nazis, d’Ora had compared the suffering of the Jewish population in her diary entries to the fate of defenseless meat stock. From 1949 d’Ora captured the abattoirs, the Parisian slaughterhouses, several times on camera. Rather than focusing on the quantity of the slaughtered cattle, she showed the silent tragedy of the maimed and killed animals. In 1958 Jean Cocteau delivered the opening address for d’Ora’s last exhibition – which featured society portraits, refugees and slaughterhouse pictures together – and was the first to point out the astonishing contrasts in the photographer’s work.

“The brand d’Ora resembles the embodiment of modern photographic technique, skillful marketing and artistic innovative power. Owing to her bourgeois, Jewish Viennese roots, her charm, humor and powers of self-assertion, Dora Kallmus not only became an international luminary of the photography scene as Madame d’Ora but also a feminist role model. This eminent exhibition at the Leopold Museum illustrates an important chapter of Austrian history that is both glamorous and painful.” --Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum

MADAME D’ORA
A BOURGEOIS BACKGROUND
Hailing from an upper-class family, Dora Philippine Kallmus was born in 1881, the second daughter of the court advocate Philipp Kallmus, in Vienna. Her father was friends with the successful newspaper publisher Moriz Szeps, the father of the journalist and writer Berta Zuckerkandl. Her relative Leopoldine (née Kallmus) was a pianist who married the industrial magnate Karl Wittgenstein, the patron of the Secessionists. Dora Kallmus kept in touch with her “aunt Poldi” into the 1920s.

METEORIC RISE AS SOUGHT-AFTER PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHER IN VIENNA
The photographer’s meteoric rise to become a sought-after portrait photographer in Vienna was preceded by a well-founded education. Dora Kallmus trained with the photographer Hans Makart – the son of the eponymous “prince of painters” of the Ringstrasse era – and at the Imperial Royal Federal Training and Research Institute of Graphic Arts in Vienna, where she caught the attention of the college’s director Josef Maria Eder. He introduced her to the tradition-steeped Photographic Society and proceeded to promote d’Ora. Already in 1905 she became a member of the Vienna Photo-Club. During a study trip to Berlin in 1907 she met Arthur Benda. They both received training in the flourishing capital of the German Empire from Nicola Perscheid, one of the most renowned photographers of his time. Following her return to Vienna, Dora Kallmus opened up a photographic studio in the autumn of 1907 as one of the first women to do so in Austria-Hungary’s metropolis, with Arthur Benda acting as her assistant. Soon, the Atelier d’Ora had established itself as the best studio for artistic portraits, and her photographs were widely disseminated through numerous newspapers and magazines in Austria and abroad, including Die Dame, Sport und Salon, as well as the Wiener Salonblatt, a paper for the Austrian aristocracy. The luminaries of art, literature, music, dance and fashion, members of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, as well as politicians and entrepreneurs, were all photographed by Dora Kallmus. Already from 1914 her photographs were published in English magazines. Immediately after World War I, photographs by Madame d’Ora were published once more, for instance from 1918 in the new Viennese magazine Moderne Welt and from the 1920s also in the magazine Die Bühne. D’Ora had a great affinity for animals and repeatedly captured ladies of society together with their dogs as “living accessories”. A famous self-portrait from 1929 shows d’Ora with a cat. The photographer started to publish articles illustrated and sometimes also written by her.

THE RICH AND BEAUTIFUL IN FRONT OF D’ORA’S LENS
At the Atelier d’Ora, the luminaries of art and fashion, of the high nobility and of politics of the 20th century were captured on camera. The first artist photographed by her was Gustav Klimt in 1907 in Vienna, the last Pablo Picasso in 1955. The photographer immortalized members of the Austrian Imperial family and the bourgeoisie, as well as actors, singers and artists. Anyone who was beautiful, rich and famous liked to be portrayed by her. The celebrities she photographed in Vienna included the author Arthur Schnitzler, the composer Alban Berg, the journalist Berta Zuckerkandl, the actress and dancer Elsie Altmann-Loos and the writer Alma Mahler, while in Paris she captured the fashion designer Coco Chanel, the dancer Josephine Baker and the artist Tamara de Lempicka, and after the War the painter Marc Chagall and the writer William Somerset Maugham. The chansonnier Maurice Chevalier, with whom she had a close connection, was photographed by her several times, already during the 1920s and also after the War. In the late 1950s, he was among the last personalities portrayed by her. D’Ora’s work traces a unique arc from the representation of the last Austrian monarch Charles I on the occasion of his coronation as King of Hungary, via the glamour of the Paris fashion world in the interwar period, to a Europe entirely changed after 1945.

MADAME D’ORA AS AN INDEPENDENT AND CREATIVE BUSINESS WOMAN
Madame d’Ora is considered the paragon of an independent, creative and modern woman who was equally successful as a business woman and as a professional, artistic photographer. Her tireless efforts in her work also served to distract her from private disappointments. Her professional success was accompanied for many years by her unhappy love for a married man, of whom we know only the pseudonym Esté.

SOUGHT-AFTER FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER AND PORTRAITIST AT THE SOPHISTICATEDSPA TOWN KARLSBAD
D’Ora made a name for herself as a fashion photographer, took shots for the sophisticated couture house Zwieback and staged the fashion creations of the Wiener Werkstätte, designed for instance by Eduard Wimmer-Wisgrill and Emilie Flöge, the muse of Gustav Klimt. In 1919 Madame d’Ora visited the chic Bohemian spa town of Karlsbad for the first time. In the early 1920s, she opened a summer studio at the Hotel Olympic Palace, which she ran as a subsidiary studio until the 1930s. In 1923 d’Ora traveled to Paris for the first time, spending several months there. She started collaborating with the fashion magazine reserved for specialized trade and founded in 1921 L’Officiel de la Mode, de la Couture et de la Confection. The magazine afforded French fashion designers the opportunity to control the appearance of their creations through highly professional photographs. D’Ora’s illustrations and cover photographs were published in the French weekly Vu and in Vogue, in the Italian illustrated magazine Excelsior as well as in the British publication The Sketch.

THE PARIS YEARS: FLAIR FOR TRENDS AND VIENNESE CHARM
In 1925 Paris became the center of d’Ora’s professional and private life. She received countless commissions from fashion and lifestyle magazines, which only started to abate from the mid-1930s when the political situation across Europe became increasingly precarious. D’Ora had an immense flair for trends. Fashion designers including Coco Chanel and the milliner Madame Agnès became models of their own innovative creations. The photographer’s studio in Paris was admired not least for its unique blend of Viennese furniture and Art Deco objects and design.

“While Dora Kallmus may have had an ambivalent relationship with her hometown, which she eventually left in 1926 for various reasons and in disappointment, she knew how to purposefully apply what is known as ‘Viennese charm’ to her demeanor and surroundings.” Monika Faber and Magdalena Vukovic, curators of the exhibition

THE BEGINNING OF THE “DARK YEARS”. NATIONAL SOCIALIST REPRESSION
When the National Socialists seized power in Germany in 1933, the fashion industry collapsed. The publishing house Ullstein, which is to this day in possession of one of the most comprehensive d’Ora archives, was officially scolded for continuing to print photographs by Madame d’Ora in magazines, and in 1934 the publishing house was “Aryanized”. During the dark years of the Nazi regime, the estate Doranna in Frohnleiten in Styria, which d’Ora and her sister Anna had bought after their father’s death, was “Aryanized” in 1939, with Anna having to go to Vienna. Plans to flee devised by the sisters failed. In 1942 Anna Kallmus was murdered by the Nazis, presumably in the extermination camp Kulmhof (present-day Chełmno, Poland).

FLIGHT FROM PARIS AND REFUGE IN THE FRENCH MOUNTAINS
Though the fashion industry continued after the occupation of Paris by German forces, d’Ora lost her most important customers. She started to experiment with a medium format Rolleiflex camera. As a Jew, she was forced to sell her Paris studio, including her technical equipment, in 1940. In 1942 she fled to the small mountain village of Lalouvesc, south of Lyon, where started to take up writing again.

“There are three things which are prerequisites for the lasting value of a photograph: technique, composition and coincidence, and it is perhaps deliberate that I put technique first.” d’Ora, c. 1942

THE POST-WAR YEARS: NEW BEGINNING AND NEW THEMES: REFUGEE CAMPS IN VIENNA AND SALZBURG
After the end of World War II, d’Ora returned to her destroyed hometown of Vienna. Having narrowly escaped death and keenly mourning the loss of her sister Anna, the portraitist of society focused her analytical and emphatic gaze on refugee camps. Likely on behalf of the UN, she documented the suffering of those banished from their homes in Viennese and Salzburg Displaced Persons Camps: among them were former forced laborers and people liberated from concentration camps, as well as “ethnic Germans” from Yugoslavia and Czechia, whom she captured in their precarious living situations. In Vienna, she also portrayed the highly active cultural city councilor Viktor Matejka in 1946, who invited those expelled by the Nazi regime to return from exile to Austria.

THE HORRORS OF THE PARISIAN SLAUGHTERHOUSES AND THE ECCENTRICITY OF MARQUIS DE CUEVAS
In Paris, d’Ora documented the drastic scenes at the abattoirs, the old Parisian slaughterhouses, with their esthetics of horror. Already during the War, she had compared the suffering of the Jewish population in her diary notes to the fate of defenseless cattle. D’Ora’s slaughterhouse series can be regarded as her reaction to and processing of the mass killings organized and implemented by the Nazis. Rather than focusing on the quantity of the slaughtered cattle, she showed the silent tragedy of the maimed and killed animals. D’Ora focused on home stories of the French haute societé, and often stayed on the Côte d’Azur. In the 1950s, she closely collaborated with the eccentric Chilean-born ballet impresario George de Cuevas (real name Jorge Cuevas Bartholín), who was married to Margaret Rockefeller, the daughter of the Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller, documenting the ballet rehearsals of his ensemble or showing him amidst skinned sheep’s heads. The photographer also captured the pompous, rococo celebration hosted by Marquis de Cuevas in Biarritz, a display of regained joie de vivre after the War.