Studio Manassé: Olga Solarics, Adorján von Wlassics and Vienna’s Glamorous Photography Revolution

Imagine strolling into a Viennese salon in the 1920s and finding a world of velvet drapes, bearskin rugs, gilded mirrors and glamorous models posing with cheeky smiles, sometimes tucked inside giant cigarette cases or clutched like sugar cubes above coffee cups. This was the brilliant and slightly surreal world of Studio Manassé, founded by Olga Solarics and Adorján von Wlassics, a husband-and-wife team who helped define the look and feel of interwar erotic photography.

Between 1922 and 1938, their Vienna studio became a creative powerhouse where pictorialist elegance, surrealist humour, and the new spirit of liberated womanhood came together in a wonderful blend.

The Rise of Studio Manassé

Studio Manassé opened its doors at a time when Vienna was undergoing a dramatic cultural transformation. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the city was alive with radical new ideas across every field, from painting and cinema to fashion and photography. The Vienna Secession movement had already shaken the old artistic orders, encouraging experimentation and individual expression. In this environment, Olga and Adorján found fertile ground for their photographic vision.

Nudes were enormously popular during this period, particularly among pictorialist photographers who sought to elevate photography to the level of fine art. Influenced by figures like Émile Joachim Constant Puyo and Anne Brigman, pictorialists manipulated light, used soft-focus lenses, and employed creative printing techniques to produce images that mimicked painting. Studio Manassé took these ideas a step further, embracing the surrealism and visual innovation of the New Vision movement. Their photographs did not simply depict reality — they transformed it.

With visual puns, clever montages and playful references to contemporary cinema, Olga and Adorján created an archive of glamorous and often erotic images. One particularly striking photograph showed a model recoiling in fear from the shadow of clawed fingers, an unmistakable nod to F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu. Their work captured the spirit of an era when both photography and society were pushing at the boundaries of the acceptable and the expected.

Behind the Lens: Olga and Adorján’s Collaboration

Studio Manassé’s photographs were not the result of a single genius, but of a true partnership. As Kristine Somerville describes in her essay Darkroom Alchemy: The Photographic Art of Studio Manassé, the work of the studio was clearly divided between the two.

Olga Solarics managed the styling, staging, and photographic direction. She was the architect of the studio’s signature look: opulent, theatrical, yet modern. Their city-centre apartment, which doubled as the studio, was lavishly decorated with Baroque furniture, Greek columns used as flower stands, rich tapestries and decorative paintings — all of which often found their way into the photographs themselves.

Adorján von Wlassics handled the post-production work, refining and enhancing the images with painstaking care. His expertise lay in artistic corrections, photomontage, retouching and painting over photographs to add new dimensions and subtleties. Together, they created not just pictures, but miniature visual worlds.

Adorján was quite philosophical about their approach to beauty. “In nature there is nothing perfect,” he once remarked. He believed that if a woman could highlight just “50% of her assets,” she could become one of those breathtaking figures who “stop traffic on the street.” His ambition was not to capture an objective reality, but to find and enhance what he called “the vibration” between subject and image — to reveal not just how a woman looked, but how she wished to be seen.

Nudes, Sex Appeal and the Changing Role of Women

The 1920s and 30s were a golden age for nudes in photography, and the work of Studio Manassé reflected broader shifts in society. Women were asserting their independence in ways that shocked older generations: cutting their hair, wearing trousers, driving cars, smoking cigarettes and demanding social equality.

The models who posed for Manassé — movie stars, cabaret singers, models, and even members of the Viennese nobility — often saw themselves as active participants rather than passive subjects. They knew they were representing themselves as modern women, not simply as muses for male artists.

The studio’s photographs, distributed internationally through the Vienna-based Schostal agency, found a wide audience. Magazines, especially the explosion of new film and entertainment publications, eagerly snapped up their striking and often playful images. Their reputation grew, and by 1932, Studio Manassé was exhibiting at prestigious events like the First International Biennial of Photographic Art in Rome and the Salon du Nu photographique in Paris, where their works were shown alongside luminaries such as Man Ray and Brassaï.

After Vienna: Survival and Reinvention

The golden years could not last. The political situation in Austria deteriorated sharply in the 1930s, culminating in the Anschluss — the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany — in 1938. As conditions became increasingly dangerous, especially for those suspected of Jewish ancestry or avant-garde leanings, Olga and Adorján made the difficult decision to leave Vienna.

They moved to Berlin, where — after certifying their Aryan and Catholic origins — they reopened a studio under the name WOG (Wlassics Olga Geschka). Before leaving Vienna, they sold the Studio Manassé name to photographer Josef Cebin on 30 June 1939.

By 1943, the couple had returned to Vienna, though the world they had known had changed irrevocably. Despite the hardships of wartime and post-war recovery, they continued to work. After Adorján’s death on 11 September 1947, Olga registered a new business: Olga Wlassics Foto Atelier, based at An der Hülben 4 in Vienna. She remained active into the late 1960s, collaborating with leading magazines such as Séduction, Die Muskete and Wiener Magazin. Occasionally, she used the joint signature Manassé-Ricoll to indicate collaborations with photographers Ulrike (Rica) and Olga Behlis.

Studio Manassé’s Lasting Legacy

Today, the work of Studio Manassé stands as a testament to a remarkable era when photography straddled the worlds of art, fashion, cinema and social revolution. Olga Solarics and Adorján von Wlassics were not merely chroniclers of their time — they were active shapers of its aesthetic ideals.

Their clever visual jokes, glamorous settings, and daring nudes captured the heady spirit of a world in transition: a world where women asserted new identities, artists pushed the limits of their mediums, and the boundaries between art and life blurred.

Though the Vienna they knew has long since passed into history, the images they created continue to enchant, provoke and inspire — reminders of a time when photography was not just about recording the visible, but about conjuring the invisible dreams and desires of an entire generation.

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