ATELIER MANASSÉ

Est. 1924

Atelier Manassé was a photo studio founded in Vienna in 1924 by the couple Olga Spolarics (1895-1969) and Andorján von Wlassics (1896-1969). Spolarics and Wlassics gained notoriety in the 1920s for their erotic nude photographs of women and built upon this notoriety by taking photographs of various notable subjects, such as Anna May Wong (1905-1961), Betty Bird (1901-1998) and Lil Dagover (1887-1980). From 1935 to 1936, the pair also ran a studio in Bucharest and opened another in Berlin under the name WOG (Wlassics/Olga/Geschke). After moving to Berlin in 1940, Spolarics and Wlassics experienced the end of the Second World War in Baden near Vienna. A year after the death of her husband in 1947, Olga Spolarics opened her own studio in Vienna, which specialised in fashion photography.