Photo Opportunities

EXHIBITIONS

Retrospective views of Dora Kallmus and William Clift

It is serendipitous, in this time of near obsession with the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to chance upon the first American retrospective of Dora Kallmus. Working under the name "Madame d'Ora" (first in her native Vienna, and later in Paris, where she lived from 1925 until her death in 1963), Kallmus created photographs— smoldering and stylized—reminiscent of Klimt and Schiele but with a tough and sinewy quality all their own. She may well have been an emigre in the City of Light, but her portraits of Parisian culturati such as Cocteau and Colette (and more obscure figures like the sadly neglected Foujita) read like a veritable Who's Who of Art Deco.

Fascinated throughout her life by dance, which she passionately documented, and living off of her portrait and fashion commissions (she was a friend and collaborator of Coco Chanel), Kallmus succeeded even though "serious" photographers paid scant attention. Whatever the stylistic excesses of her pictures, they, like Schiele's, are compelling—indigenous to a period as familiar as our own, and, just possibly, preferable to it.

F.I.T. New York. (6/238/1)

RICHARD MERKIN

If the great American frontier has been parceled and paved, if the sublime has yielded to the toxic, William Clift hasn t heard about it. His photographs of the American Southwest frame a landscape clear and majestic, with but the slightest trace of man and his ways. Clift is keeping alive not only an idea and a vision but a picture-making tradition; he is the craft-conscious heir to Ansel Adams.

Art Institute of Chicago. (Through 6/21)

GERALD MARZORATI