Amazing Vintage Portraits by Madame d’Ora (1910s-1920s)

Dora Philippine Kallmus (1881 – October 28, 1963) was an Austrian-Jewish fashion and portrait photographer who went by the name Madame D’ora. Dora, born in Vienna in 1881, came from a respected family of Jewish lawyers. In 1905 she was the first woman to be admitted to theory courses at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt. That same year she became a member of the Vienna Photographic Society. She trained at Nicola Perscheid’s studio in Berlin, where she became friends with his assistant Arthur Benda. In 1907 she opened a photography studio with Benda in Vienna called the Benda-D’Ora Studio. What followed was  a distinguished career as a salon photographer. In 1925, she moved her atelier to Paris, and during the 30s and 40s rose to international prominence through society and high fashion photography. Both her er studios in Vienna and Paris became fashionable meeting places for the cultural and intellectual elite. In Vienna she had  become extremely popular among the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy.

Her subjects included intellectuals, dancers, actors, painters, and writers, fx.  Josephine Baker, Tamara de Lempicka, Maurice Chevalier, Colette, Niddy Impekoven. These vibrant portraits of twentieth-century artists and intellectuals remain important testaments to European cultural life at the turn of the century and beyond.

According to Jewish Women Encyclopedia D’Ora was one of the first photographers to focus on the emerging areas of modern, expressive dance and fashion, particularly after 1920, when fashion photographs started to replace drawings in magazines. While her photographic technique was not radical, her avant-garde subject matter was a risky choice. D’Ora’s photographs captured her clients’ individuality with new, natural positions in contrast to stiff, old-fashioned poses. D’Ora’s achievements also paved the way for other European women’s careers in photography, an area in which many Jewish women in particular found success.

When the Germans invaded France, Madame D’ora fled to a convent in the country side.  Dora returned to France in 1946 and re-opened the studio.

In 1959 she was involved in a serious traffic accident that left her an invalid. She died in Frohnleiten, Steiermark, Austria, in 1963.

Marie Conte by Madame d’Ora

Fashion study by Madame d’Ora & Arthur Benda. Vienna, ca 1920

Vintage Photos of The Infamous Anita Berber

Anita Berber (1899-1928) was immensely famous in 1920s Berlin. Berber was a dancer, actress, and writer who epitomized the excesses and decadences of the German Roaring Twenties. Incredibly, given her notoriety, almost no one in the present day would have heard of Anita Berber were it not for a portrait by Otto Dix from 1925.

Born in Leipzig to musician parents who later divorced, she was raised mainly by her grandmother in Dresden. In time Berber would exert a huge impact on Weimar Berlin, whose excesses and experimentation she both embodied and surpassed. Simply, in a period when Berlin was rethinking art, politics and life itself, Berber was going further than anyone else, blurring the line between life and performance, setting new standards for scandal and audacity.

It was her public appearances that really challenged taboos. Berber’s overt drug addiction and bisexuality were matters of public chatter. In addition to her addiction to cocaine, opium and morphine, one of Berber’s favourites was chloroform and ether mixed in a bowl. This would be stirred with a white rose, the petals of which she would then eat.

According to Mel Gordon, in The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin’s Priestess of Debauchery, she was diagnosed with severe tuberculosis while performing abroad. After collapsing in Damascus, she returned to Germany and died in a Kreuzberg hospital on 10 November 1928.

Anita Berber, by Madame d’Ora, 1921.

Anita berber, ca. 1920 via

Anita Berber

Anita Berber

Vintage Photos Featuring Dancer Maria Ley-Piscator (1920s)

Maria Ley-Piscator (b. Friederike Czada 1898 – 1999) was born in Vienna and was educated as a solo dancer. She found international succes in the 1920s.

She is best known as the wife of Erwin Piscator – Germany’s famous left-wing theater director.

In the 1930s she studied literature at the Sorbonne, where she met Erwin Piscator during his exile in 1936. By then she had been married twice. Her first husband Robert Bauer had disappeared without a trace and her second husband, AEG heir Frank Deutsch,  had committed suicide in Paris after Hitler came to power.

After marrying in Paris, the couple moved to Manhattan in 1939, where they founded the Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research. Their students included Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando and Tony Randall. Ley-Piscator directed several theatrical productions off Broadway.

During the 1970s she worked as a teacher at the Southern Illinois University Carbondale and at Stony Brook University. Ley-Piscator died in New York in 1999 at the age of 101.

Maria Ley 1922 via

Maria Ley 1924 by Madam d´Ora via

Maria Ley c.1926 via

Maria Ley at Roger Wolfe Kahn’s Club by Madam d’Ora via

Vintage Photos of Elegant Millinery by Madame Agnès

Madame Agnes (late 1800s-1949) was France’s most popular milliner. She designed hats that were popular from the late 1920s until the 1940s. She was famous for cutting the brims of her hats while they were worn by her customers. Her shop was located on the Rue Saint-Honoré.

She associated with people in the art circles of Paris and styled hats that were both abstract and unique. She preferred wearing only black fashions, fx. in 1929 she wore black satin frocks designed by Vionnet. Her clothes were embellished with bright jewelry like red coral, jade or lapis lazuli.

Madame Agnes

Madame Agnes in her shop in Paris, 1935

Edward Steichen, Dorothy Smart, hat by Madame Agnès, 1926

Madame Jean Lassalle hat by Madame Agnès, Madame d’Ora, 1929

Portrait of the milliner Agnès by Madame d’Ora, Paris, 1928-1931

Model in hat of bird of paradise feathers by Madame Agnès, spangled jacket by Maggy Rouff, photo by George Hoyningen-Huene, Harper’s Bazaar, 1935

Vintage Photos Featuring Arletty by Madame d’Ora

Arletty (1898 – 1992) was a French actress, singer, and fashion model. Born to a working-class family, she left home and pursued a modeling career, after her father’s death. She took the stage name “Arlette” based on the heroine of a story by Maupassant.

Her early career was dominated by the music hall, and she later appeared in plays and cabaret. Arletty was a stage performer for ten years before her film debut in 1930. Her career took off around 1936, when she appeared as the leading lady in the stage plays Les Joies du Capitole and Fric-Frac, in which she starred opposite Michel Simon. She later starred as Blanche in the French version of A Streetcar Named Desire.

She was imprisoned in 1945 for her wartime liaison with a German Luftwaffe officer, Hans-Jürgen Soehring, during the occupation of France. For her crimes she received a sentence of eighteen months imprisonment, most of which was served in a private chateau.

In 1995, the government of France issued a series of limited edition coins to commemorate the centenary of film that included a 100 Franc coin bearing her image.

Arletty by Madame d’Ora, Paris, 1920 via

Arletty by Madame d’Ora, 1929 via

Arletty by Madame d’Ora, Paris, 1920 via

Arletty by Madame d’Ora, Paris, 1920 via

Arletty by Madame d’Ora, Paris, 1920 via

Vintage Photos Featuring Dancer Leïla Bederkhan

Leyla Bedirhan (1903-1986) was born in Istanbul. She was the daughter of a kurdish Prince and his Polish wife. She studied ballet in Germany.

Leïla Bederkhan was the name she preferred to use in Europe. She was the . She performed in Europe and the United States with a modern dance program composed of works inspired by Assyrian and Egyptian dance styles. Intending to highlight the historical roots of her choreography, she put on her performances in authentic locations; and she produced a dance exhibition utilizing the Great Sphynx at Giza in Egypt as a background (source). She died in Paris.

Leïla Bederkhan by Madame d’Ora (Dora Kallmus) via

Leïla Bederkhan by Arnold Genthe via

Leïla Bederkhan via

 

Three Portraits of Jazz Age Artist Tamara de Lempicka

Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) was a Polish Art Deco painter and “the first woman artist to be a glamour star”

She was born Maria Górska in Warsaw, Poland on May 16 (there are claims that she was in fact born in Moscow, Russia).

In 1916 Tamara married lawyer Tadeusz Lempicki in St. Petersburg, Russia and gave birth to a daughter she named Maria Krystyna, also known as Kizette.

In 1917 Tadeusz de Lempicki was arrested by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution but was soon released with the help of his wife. They traveled to Denmark and England and finally settled in Paris, France. Here Tamara studied art the “Academie de la Grande Chaumiere” in Montparnasse under Maurice Denis and Andre Lhote and started to exhibit in Paris in the early 1920s.

In 1925 she had her first major exhibition in Milan, Italy. It is believed that she finished 28 new works in 6 months.

In 1928 she divorced her husband and in 1933 she married the Baron Raoul Kuffner. They settled in the states and after Kuffner died she moved to Mexico where she died in 1980.

Tamara de Lempicka via

Tamara de Lempicka in Marcel Rochas Dress, photographed by Ora, ca. 1931 via

Tamara de Lempicka via