THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Monday, March 9, 2020 |A
wish to be photographed
should “bring along soft fab-
rics, furs, muffs, evening
coats, shawls, hats, etc.” that
would be used to create por-
traits “in keeping with their
individuality.” Such props
were supplemented by oth-
ers in d’Ora’s studio. A pose
was also a persona.
Some of these portraits go
no further, but d’Ora’s ambi-
tion, it seems, was then to
dismantle the pose, revealing
the subject’s flickering inner
life: A young Alban Berg
(1909), then studying with
Arnold Schoenberg, is
dreamily gazing off to the
side, caught in midthought.
That inner life might even be
suggested without being
seen: “Actress Grete Jacob-
son in a house dress from
the Wiener Werkstätte”
(1917) shows us the actress
facing away, gripping—al-
most embracing—a mirror
either before or after a per-
formance: an image of al-
most desperate narcissism.
Throughout her career,
many of d’Ora’s photographs
also seem to reflect aspects
of Viennese fin-de-siècle cul-
ture in which the hierarchical
public realm, supposedly gov-
erned by reason, is replaced
with an almost hieratic sub-
mersion in the numinous, in-
stinctive and subliminal. In
d’Ora’s work, those forces are
seen in the gaze of the eyes,
or they erupt in the leaps of
dancers, or emerge with pol-
ish in the glances of intro-
spective models whose
clothes can seem reflections
of thoughts. Toward the end
of her life, one of d’Ora’s re-
curring subjects was the bal-
let impresario, the Marquis
de Cuevas, who became al-
most an icon of culturally
decadent wealth: A 1956-
photo, perversely sardonic,
shows him lying amid skinned
sheep heads d’Ora had gath-
ered from slaughterhouses.
The exhibition would have
been still more powerful if it
had been more elaborate in
its identifications, and dem-
onstrated the networks of
connections and allusions be-
hind these images. One exam-
ple: “Composer Alma Mahler”
(1916). She did write some
music, but it isn’t as a com-
poser that we know her or
that d’Ora photographed her
(at perhaps age 37). Klimt
had loved her. She married
Gustav Mahler, then the ar-
chitect Walter Gropius, and fi-
nally the writer Franz Werfel.
Along the way she had a liai-
son with the painter Oskar
Kokoschka (also photo-
graphed by d’Ora). She was,
by all accounts, brilliant, dis-
arming, seductive, inspiring,
arrogant. D’Ora’s photograph,
taken a year after the mar-
riage to Gropius, makes it all
plausible. An animal pelt is
wrapped around her neck.
She seems almost coyly de-
mure with a faint smile; but
her gaze is proud, indepen-dent, alluring.
Here, as in other cases, we
would see more by knowing
more. But the achievement of
this exhibition is that it is
also enough to begin as Ma-
dame d’Ora did—by looking.Madame d’Ora
Neue Galerie New York,
through June 8Mr. Rothstein is the Journal’s
Critic at Large.New York
DORA KALLMUS (1881-1963)
initially wanted a career in
the theater or to work as a
seamstress, occupations her
lawyer father deemed inap-
propriate for a young woman
from a high-bourgeois Jewish
family in fin-de-siècle Vienna.
Instead, in 1906, he provided
what she suggested was an
immense sum allowing her to
apprentice to a Berlin pho-
tographer and, the following
year, helped her open a por-
trait studio in Vienna with
Arthur Benda.
That career must have ful-
filled both of her aspirations,
given her clientele of per-
formers, artists, writers,
dancers, directors and de-
signers, along with the cos-
tumes she provided or asked
her sitters to bring. She ap-
proached photography as a
dramaturge: The studio was
her theater, and her casting
of Vienna’s close-knit cul-
tural elites was preserved in
photographs: the painter
Gustav Klimt, the playwright
Arthur Schnitzler, the writer
Karl Kraus, even the Imperial
family. Kallmus also created
her own “stage” persona,
calling herself Madame
d’Ora, distancing herself
from her ethnic origins, af-
firming Francophilia, and
hinting at aristocracy.
Now, in “Madame d’Ora”
at the Neue Galerie New
York—described as the larg-
est museum retrospective of
her work ever presented in
the U.S.—we can trace her
career. In the 1920s and ’30s
she became one of the pre-
mier fashion photographers
in Paris. Then came years of
no photographs during the
Nazi occupation, after she
was forced to wear a yellow
armband (despite her earlier
conversion to Catholicism)ART REVIEW
Approaching Photography
As a Dramaturge
A talented portraitist who found theatrical spectacle in many of her subjects
BYEDWARDROTHSTEIN and roundups of foreign Jews
began. She ultimately hid in
a village in Vichy France; her
sister in Austria was de-
ported and murdered. In the
postwar world, d’Ora re-
turned to portraiture—we
see Picasso, Maurice Cheva-
lier—but Nazi-era scars are
evident in her projects pho-
tographing Parisian abattoirs
and displaced-person camps.
The curator, Monika Faber,
director of the Photoinstitut
Bonartes in Vienna, who has
curated other shows for the
Neue Galerie New York, has
gathered more than 100 pho-
tographs in three galleries
corresponding to three actsof d’Ora’s career. The first
gallery, “Vienna 1908-23,”
though, sets the tone for
what follows.
Most of that gallery’s pho-
tographs show public fig-
ures, posed in stylized isola-
tion. They also share another
characteristic. The subjects
seem caught in a frozen mo-
ment of motion, contempla-
tion or recognition. Members
of “The Wiener Konzerthaus-
quartett” (1913) are gathered
around a score; each appears
to be a soloist following a
different train of thought. In
“Actress Olga Schnitzler (née
Gussmann) with her daugh-
ter Lili” (c. 1910), a mirror
near the reluctant subject
catches a glimpse of the on-
looking husband, Arthur
Schnitzler.
A 1913 publicity text cited
in the invaluable catalog an-
nounced that women whoThe largest
American museum
retrospective of
Madame d’Ora’s workNACHLASS MADAME D’ORA, MUSEUM FU R KUNST UND GEWERBE HAMBURG (3); THE JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK (SISTERS)
Dora Kallmus aka Madame d’Ora’s ‘The Dolly Sisters’ (c. 1928–
29), above; ‘Actor and singer Maurice Chevalier’ (1927), above
left; ‘Writer Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette)’ (1954), below; and
‘Painter Tsuguharu Foujita’ (1926), bottom leftLIFE & ARTS
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