Madame d’Ora: Make Me Beautiful!

The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG) is presenting the first-ever comprehensive retrospective of the work of photographer Madame d’Ora (1881–1963), undertaking a re-assessment of her oeuvre with a special focus on the postwar years. Over 30 years after the first monograph on d’Ora described her as a society portraitist, new findings have cast a different light on her body of work. Examining more closely the photographer’s personal environment, it is evident that social, economic, and political changes during her lifetime in some cases had a radical impact on her work. A thorough review of the written material in her estate and numerous newly discovered photographs offer fresh insights into d’Ora’s roots in Vienna’s Jewish bourgeoisie, her longstanding friendships with Maurice Chevalier and the Parisian milliner Madame Agnès, and her complex commissions for the ballet impresario Marquis de Cuevas. The exhibition brings together some 170 photographic works from the MKG collection, the Bonartes Collection in Vienna, the collection of the Ullstein publishing house, and from private collections. Fashion objects from the MKG, the Wien Museum, and the University of Applied Arts Vienna are also on display. The show is presented in cooperation with the Photoinstitut Bonartes in Vienna.

At the beginning of the 20th century, having one’s portrait done by Madame d’Ora guaranteed a likeness with a touch of French savoir faire. From 1910 to the 1930s, she was the portraitist of choice for Viennese and Parisian society as well as the bohemian artist scene. Madame d’Ora photographed writers such as Arthur Schnitzler, the Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, the scandalous naked dancers Anita Berber and Josephine Baker and giants of the fashion world such as Coco Chanel and Madame Agnès. Portraits from the Atelier d’Ora reflect the subjects’ claim to a place in the world of the beautiful, cultivated, and famous. Thanks to her highly successful cooperation with image and magazine agencies, Madame d’Ora reached a broad public with her pictures. Her portraits and fashion photographs chronicle the transition from the aristocratic ideal to the image of the “new woman”, which was largely shaped by the world of theatre and film and spread by the rapidly evolving magazine culture. During the Nazi regime, the Jewish photographer received fewer and fewer commissions. In 1942 she eluded deportation by fleeing to a mountain village in the Ardèche. Returning to Paris in 1945, she resumed her work as a portrait photographer. And yet the wartime horrors she had witnessed haunted her: Madame d’Ora turned her attention to the victims of society and the war, taking photographs in Austrian refugee camps and Parisian slaughterhouses.

The majority of the photographer’s estate is housed at MKG. In addition to some 500 original prints, this also includes negatives and contact sheets, as well as her correspondence and the customer book from her studio. The exhibition repositions the photographer based on newly reviewed material from photo agencies, placing greater emphasis on the great quantity of photographs she published in periodicals. The works in the MKG collection are supplemented by international loans from Austrian institutions and private collectors.

The exhibition was developed in collaboration with the Photoinstitut Bonartes in Vienna. After Hamburg, it will be shown at the Leopold Museum in Vienna (July 13–October 29, 2018) and the Neue Galerie Museum for German and Austrian Art in New York.

Catalogue
Madame d’Ora. Machen Sie mich schön! Edited by Monika Faber, Esther Ruelfs and Magdalena Vuković, with contributions by Andrea Amort, Christian Brandstätter, Monika Faber, Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Cathrin Hauswald, Sylvie Lécallier, Peter Schreiner, Esther Ruelfs, Aenne Soell, Katharina Sykora, Magdalena Vuković and others, German, 355 pages, Brandstätter Verlag. An English edition will be published by Thames and Hudson in 2018.

Curators
Hamburg: Dr. Esther Ruelfs and Dr. Cathrin Hauswald, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Vienna: Monika Faber and Magdalena Vuković, Photoinstitut Bonartes

Press contact 
Michaela Hille, presse [​at​] mkg-hamburg.de / T +49 40 428134 800