Madame d’Ora Went From Being Vienna’s Premier Society Photographer to Europe’s Social Conscience—See Her Indelible Work Here

While museums around the globe are closed to the public, we
are spotlighting an inspiring exhibition that had been on view
somewhere around the world each day. Even if you can’t see it in
person, allow us to give you a virtual look. 

“Madame
d’Ora“
Neue Galerie, New York

What the museum
says: “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.”

Why it’s worth a look: It’s the largest museum
retrospective to date of an artist who has remained in the margins
of history books but was at the center of Viennese society during
much of her life—and then had an astounding second act as the
creator of searing images of those affected by World War II.

The daughter of a well-connected lawyer, a young d’Ora leveraged
her family’s connections to turn her lens on the likes of Pablo
Picasso and the writer Colette. Artist Jean Cocteau once
described her as an “ageless woman, more lucid than any young man,”
who “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.”

With the onset of World War II, d’Ora’s personal life, and her
career, were forever changed. Many of her family and friends,
including her sister Anna Kallmus, perished in the Chełmno
concentration camp, and d’Ora’s lauded studio—the first ever owned
by a woman in Vienna—was lost when the Nazis invaded Paris. After
the war ended, d’Ora committed herself to documenting the darker
aspects of life, though she maintained working as a society
photographer to keep herself afloat.

Around 1948, the United Nations commissioned d’Ora to photograph
displaced persons around European camps, and in the final years of
her life, she dedicated herself to the bleak project of
photographing slaughterhouses around Paris, which she deemed “my
big final work.”

What it looks like: 

Although the museum is currently closed, “Madame d’Ora” is
scheduled to remain on view at the Neue Galerie in New York until
June 8, 2020. 

The post Madame d’Ora Went From Being Vienna’s Premier
Society Photographer to Europe’s Social Conscience—See Her
Indelible Work Here appeared first on artnet News.