That's what she looked like, Madame d'Ora's World.

What a story: In Vienna, around 1900, a young woman began an unprecedented career as a professional photographer. Similar to Emilie Flöge in the reform industry, she is also a strong and economically successful woman of the Viennese "Creative Industries" of international renown. As "Madame d 'Ora", the animated lawyer Dora Kallmus became an international brand in a few years, settled in Paris in 1925 and photographed fashion, stars and stage. ;avant-garde. Until the Nazis come to power. As a Jew she had to hide, survive in a village in the south of France, try to gain a foothold in Paris after the war, but died impoverished in 1963 from Styrian Frohnleiten. Forget the world.

The Austrian photography historian Monika Faber is no stranger to the fact that she is no longer today. The 1983 monograph and the first smaller retrospective in Vienna, Germany and New York rediscovered Kallmus. After that, surprisingly little happened. In France, for example, where she invented fashion photography in the '20s and' 30s, she is still a footnote today (for nationalistic reasons?). And there was nothing better to do in Frohnleiten than to let the tomb of Kallmus and his sister, pushed by the Nazis (also residents) into concentration camps and their deaths, be driven to death. It was a community bus tour to Vienna, recommended to the Leopold Museum, on the return trip you can think a lot. For example, the distribution of honorary graves. And if that would not have allowed such a star.

Continued exhibition in New York

Because it was Dora Kallmus. After the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg, which inherited the estate at first sight (through the intermediary of a German photographer and late acquaintance of the photographer), this first retrospective 2020, which does justice to his work, also becomes the New Gallery of New York. being seen. With loans from the Metropolitan Museum in front, where a lot of clothes have landed, in which Mrs. Ora photographed her friends, actresses, dancers, artists and it-girls of her time. An ingenious marketing trick, glamorous fashion with the wearer's glamor, the catalog adorns Tamara Lempi-cka in the creation of avant-garde hats.

But also male counterparts were regulars at the Ora Workshop. This started from the beginning with Gustav Klimt in the newly opened Viennese branch in 1908, then on the breathtaking Maurice Chevalier, whose long staging for the Schmachtblick woman in his Paris studio from 1925 took place . And reached to a brilliant in the camera Picbado, the last artist, that she photographed in 1955. What life at what time.

At first she wanted to go to the theater

We notice from Oras the meaning of the drama, the pose, of her opulent portraits of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy, that she was the first daughter of the leading Viennese historicist painter Hans Makart was allowed to breathe the air of the artist. She wanted to go to the theater herself, or to fashion like the Flöge perhaps. When she was on vacation by necessity (there was, sapperlott, no postcards in Nice) bought the first camera, it quickly became clear (and the family much better) – Dora became a photographer.

Dora Kallmus was then the first woman, who was approved for the theoretical courses on "graphic" of today (practical? No way). For this she studied with one of the first German professional photographers in Berlin and immediately recruited the badistant, Arthur Benda, who became his cameraman, technical director and business partner. The world could be conquered by his eye. Start the career. And it was stiff. Finally, Madam Ora has not only made a beautiful, as a post Alma Mahler letter taking the title of the exhibition, but beautiful. Thanks to the soft focus, direct lighting and brilliant productions of Madame, including an exquisite supply of accessories. You can see the game in the poses, in which the Viennese painter Mileva Roller threw herself between Femme Fatale and her mother. We see amazing Ora's ability to make ugliness at least eccentric. You can see a particularity in Vienna, which is so rarely embraced by fashion shows, in original fashion couture showcases. In general, the show of her protagonist, who is so critical of her, is of an appropriate elegance. A pleasure

What you do not see are examples of the art of beautification, kind of before / after. What you do not read, with many quotes on the walls, are the biographical writings and photographic reflections of Ora, which cover 3500 pages, as told the conservative Faber, who was here with his colleague Magdalena Vukovic. To be published.

Photos of dead animals and refugees

Most of this was written in Ora's hiding place. When she reappeared, everything was different. His sister had not escaped the Nazi killing machine. D'Ora photographed a different killing industry in the slaughterhouses of Paris. And photographed in the refugee camps of Vienna and Salzburg old, sick, children, in particular, it is interesting, moved "ethnic Germans", so that the "authors", who appeared in their pictures as " victims". That's how you could interpret that. (Presented at the Museum am Mönchsberg at this time.) In the last exhibition of d 'Ora in Paris, opened in 1955 by Jean Cocteau, she showed these refugee portraits with slaughterhouse series and glamorous photography. "This is how it happens, this world", we would like to quote a collage of newspaper photos of the artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis of 1933, murdered in a concentration camp. "If you do not like it, you have to change it."

Make Me Beautiful, Madame d'Ora, Leopold Museum, until October 29th.

Resonance of Exile, Museum of Modern, Salzburg, until October 28.

("Die Presse", printed edition, 19.07.2018)