Tag Archives: Josephine Baker

MADAME D’ORA

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Madame d’Ora—born Dora Kallmus in Vienna in 1881—was the first woman admitted into the Association of Austrian Photographers. Documenting the leading lights of Viennese culture and fashion—her first portrait was of Gustav Klimt—the Francophile lenswoman opened a studio in Paris in 1925, shooting Maurice Chevalier, Josephine Baker, and Gabrielle Chanel, among others.

When the Nazis overran the French capital in 1940, d’Ora fled to Ardèche, in the southeast. After the war—most of her family were murdered in the camps—she returned to Paris and began a series of portraits of displaced persons and Parisian slaughterhouses.

Madame d’Ora, fanned by the wing of genius, strolls in a labyrinth whose minotaur goes from the Dolly Sisters to the terrible bestiary of the slaughterhouses—where this ageless woman, more lucid than any young man, 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. — Jean Cocteau, 1958

MADAME D’ORA—the exhibition curently on view at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan—is the largest museum retrospective on the photographer to date in this country.

MADAME D’ORA

Through June 8.

Neue Galerie

1048 Fifth Avenue (at 86th Street), New York City.

Madame d’Ora, from top: Tamara de Lempicka, hat by Rose Descat, 1933; Josephine Baker, 1928, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg; Displaced persons camp in Austria, 1945; Tsuguharu Foujita; Colette, 1954, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg; Madame Agnès with a hat made of velvet with transparent brim, circa 1936, Photoinstitut Bonartes, Vienna; Helene Jamrich with a hat from Zwieback, designed by Rudolf Krieser, 1909, Photoinstitut Bonartes, Vienna; Alban Berg, 1909, Höhere Graphische Bundes-Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt, Vienna; Countess von Haugwitz-Széchényi, Countess Khevenhüller-Fürstenberg, and Countess Marie Choloniewska serving in the Red Cross during the First World War, 1914, Ullstein Bild collection; Elsie Altmann-Loos, 1922, photoarchive Setzer-Tschiedel / IMAGNO; Pablo Picasso, 1955, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg; Coco Chanel, 1923, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg; Elizabeth Strong-Cuevas in a costume by Pierre Balmain; Madame d’Ora self-portrait. Images courtesy and © the photographer’s estate and all agencies names above.

THE TIMES OF BILL CUNNINGHAM

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I’m not talented. Wee Gee was a real photographer… I’m lightweight stuff… I think of myself as a fashion historian… [Street photographer] Harold Chapman was the biggest influence on me… He taught me to be invisible. “Stop waving that camera around like a fan,” was his expression… 

I’m strictly interested in the way women dress in their own lives. — Bill Cunningham*

Cunningham—New York City’s greatest postwar documentarian of street style—was incredibly self-deprecating, claiming that his New York Times colleagues dismissed his regular columns “On the Street” and “Evening Hours” as “filling around the edges of the ads.”

Arriving in New York in 1949 at age 19, Cunningham went to work as a milliner at Bonwit Teller and the high-end boutique Chez Ninon, where Jacqueline Kennedy and Babe Paley shopped for line-for-line copies of couture originals. While Ninon’s proprietors valued his contribution, they did their best to push him away from fashion and into “straight” journalism—above all keeping him away from Diana Vreeland, fearing the eccentric editor would irrevocably seduce/corrupt the impressionable young man.

(Of course, Cunningham and Vreeland eventually met, and the photographer went on to document nearly every show the doyenne of fashion staged at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute.)

In the new documentary THE TIMES OF BILL CUNNINGHAM—directed by Mark Bozek, and constructed around a long on-camera interview he shot with the photographer in 1994—Cunningham tells his tale: making hats under the name “William J,” sharing a loft at the Carnegie Hall studios with Bobby Short, Marlon Brando, and Norman Mailer, decamping to Paris for the shows during his U.S. Army stint in Rochefort-sur-Mer.

In the early 1960s, Cunningham wrote a column for John Fairchild’s Womens Wear Daily, and in 1967 was given a small Olympus-Pen by David Montgomery, who worked with Antonio Lopez. A Cunningham street photo of Greta Garbo was published in the Times in 1978, and his career at the paper began.

The year of the film’s interview is key. 1994 was at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and several times during the second half of the film, Cunningham breaks down in anguish at the loss of loved ones, including Lopez and his partner Juan Ramos.

THE TIMES OF BILL CUNNINGHAM

Now playing.

Royal

11523 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles.

Playhouse 7

673 East Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena.

Town Center 5

17200 Ventura Boulevard, Encino.

From top: Bill Cunningham in Paris in 1970, photograph by Jean Luce Hure. All other images by Cunningham: street views, New York (3); Grace Coddington, New York; Anna Piaggi; Josephine Baker, surrounded by models including Pat Cleveland and Bethann Hardison, at the “Battle of Versailles” fashion show, 1973; Kay Thompson, who choreographed Halston’s segment of the show; Diana Vreeland, New York, at the Costume Institute in the 1970s; André Leon Talley, Vreeland’s then-assistant, at the Costume Institute; Vreeland and Marisa Berenson; Sonny Bono, Cher, and Ahmet Ertegun (in glasses); Gloria Swanson, New York; Greta Garbo, New York; street scene, New York; Gay Pride Parade, New York, 1970s; Juan Ramos (left) and Antonio Lopez; James Kaliardos (second from left), Stephen Gan (second from right), and Cecelia Dean (right) in 1991, displaying issue #1 of Visionaire. Below, Cunningham in Paris. Images courtesy and © the estate of Bill Cunningham and Greenwich Entertainment.

KIRSTEIN ON VAN VECHTEN

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“Carl Van Vechten made Harlem real to me…. [He] found the natural flair, the talent for rhythm and expressiveness, the joy, the fire, the murder, and the verbal accuracy in the vernacular in the day-to-day life….To us, Harlem was far more an arrondissement of Paris than a battleground of Greater New York. It was the Harlem of Josephine Baker….open and welcoming to Miguel Covarrubias, to Muriel Draper, and to all writers and artists who recognized in its shadows the only true elegance in America….

“Carl was the first person who told me how Nijinsky danced, in such a manner and with such intensity that I often used his description later as a personal lie, pretending to have experienced this dancer, who, in real life, I had never seen. Yet, somehow, I never, at least to myself, felt myself a liar. I had merely used Carl’s eyes.”

— from: Lincoln Kirstein, “Carl Van Vechten: 1880–1964,” in By With To & From: A Lincoln Kirstein Reader, ed. Nicholas Jenkins (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), 31–37.

Writer, editor, arts patron, and entrepreneur Lincoln Kirstein (1907–1996)—a neo-classical modernist—was the founder of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art (a direct antecedent to the Museum of Modern Art), and co-founder—with George Balanchine—of the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet.

Carl Van Vechten—court photographer for the Harlem Renaissance and Manhattan’s literati and performing arts worlds throughout the 1930s, 40s, and 50s—was also a dance critic, novelist, and Gertrude Stein’s literary executor.

See Martin Duberman, The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); and Edward White, The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014).

From top: Walker Evans, Lincoln Kirstein, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1928; Pavel Tchelitchew, Portrait of Lincoln Kirstein, 1937.