Baker Museum Chief Curator Courtney McNeil says that the Tamara de Lempicka retrospective is more than an exhibition of her Art Deco art.
“It's also a fascinating story about Tamara herself as a person … and the identity she carved for herself in the artistic world at a time that presented many challenges to women artists in general.”
Lempicka was a master marketer on par with Dali, Picasso and Warhol.
“She had to reinvent herself several different times, including after her divorce,” McNeil noted. “She married a baron, and so then for a time she was known as the baroness with a brush.”
Her carefully curated image attracted lucrative high-society commissions.
“If she was alive today, she would be a social media star,” McNeil observed. “She would be a branding star. She really was aware of the images of herself that were out in the world and the persona that she presented, and so she was just relentlessly glamorous, perfectly coiffed and put together, the perfect makeup at all times, dripping with diamond bracelets. Whenever she completed a big commission, she'd use her earnings and buy a diamond bracelet for the glamour."
The exhibition also highlights her bisexuality during a sexually repressive era.
“This manifests in her work in some amazing depictions of the female form that really question the traditional male gaze that was prevalent throughout art history in depictions of the female nude,” said McNeil.
The Tamara de Lempicka retrospective is on view through Feb. 8.
MORE INFORMATION:
In addition to drawing attention to Lempicka’s efforts to project a specific persona, McNeil notes that the retrospective also illuminates “the background she comes from and the challenges she overcame.”
Timeline
While it’s not entirely clear, it appears that Lempicka was born in Warsaw (or so she claimed) and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia.
“Recent research revealed that she was born several years earlier than was previously believed,” McNeil said. “She had forged her year of birth to make herself a couple years younger, which I'm sure we're all tempted to do from time to time.”
She married very young to a man named Tadeusz, whom she met and with whom she felt an instant connection.
“He was the most handsome man at a party she was attending, and she set her sights on marrying him,” said McNeil. “He was a member of the aristocratic class, and he had a bright future ahead of him working for the monarchy in Russia in St. Petersburg. And then, of course, 1917 happened.”
After the Bolshevik Revolution, former aristocrats had no place in contemporary Russia. Tadeusz was imprisoned, and Lempicka and her daughter fled the country, landing in Paris.
After his release, Tadeusz joined Lempicka and their daughter, but he was not highly motivated to provide the family with a decent income.
“She realized early on that if she wanted money coming in, she had to earn it herself,” McNeil recounted. “She had always loved drawing and making art and decided that that would be what she would pursue."
At the time, women did not have access to the art education opportunities men enjoyed.
“They weren't allowed to take life drawing classes because it was thought that working with nude models would upset the female sensibility,” McNeil observed. “It was not considered proper, so there were actual art instruction opportunities that were off limits to women.”
While she was mostly self-taught, concentrating on the classics for emulation and inspiration, in Paris she also studied with André Lhote, a French Cubist figurative, portrait, landscape and still life painter.
Female artists were also taken less seriously by both art critics and potential patrons.
“Lempicka fits into that narrative really interestingly,” McNeil noted. “She was very much aware of this discrimination and at the start of her career, she signed her paintings with the masculinized version of her name. Rather than the feminine de Lempicka, she signed them ‘Monsieur Lempicki,’ knowing that if she was identifiable as a woman artist, right off the bat her work would be subject to this additional scrutiny or discrimination. So for a time, she was really hiding her gender altogether by signing with a male name. That lessened as she became better known, and her public persona became part of her artistic work, artistic presence.”
In spite of the obstacles placed in her way by the art world and society, Lempicka quickly became an accomplished artist and one of the most sought-after portraitists in Paris.
“She made great headway in attracting high-society clientele, doing society portraits, which would be the type of work she's best known for.”
She enjoyed great success in the 1920s and ‘30s, in spite of the global depression. But having weathered the Bolshevik Revolution, she grew increasingly alarmed by the rise of Nazism and began preparing to flee Europe.
As noted earlier, Lempicka took a portion of each commission she painted and bought a diamond bracelet or other jewelry to augment the glamorous image she projected to potential patrons. But there was a pragmatic aspect to this, as well, namely portability.
“If she ever had to flee and relocate again, she could take all her wealth with her, which you can't do in other contexts,” observed McNeil, “which turned out to be a brilliant move when she had to flee to Nassau.”
From there, Lempicka went to Los Angeles and spent the rest of her life in the United States and then later in Mexico, as well.
“To make all this easier to understand, my wonderful team designed a timeline. We did the graphic design in-house and I felt like it was really important to not distract from the paintings, but to have a level of sophistication of the design that matched the look of the paintings and I'm really happy and proud of my team for how it all turned out.”
‘I have no children; my paintings are my children’
“We also have a couple of wonderful pieces of ephemera here, including this magazine from 1922 that had a beautiful feature, an interiors feature, about her home and studio in Paris,” McNeil said.
In the two decades between World War I and II, she socialized with and painted portraits of numerous members of her era’s elite, including the Marquis d’Afflitto and cabaret singer Marjorie Ferry. By 1922, she had attained a level of success that enabled her to move into an apartment on Rue Méchain in the 14th arrondissement of Paris that was designed by the modernist architect Robert Mallet-Stevens. Spread over three floors, the suite was viewed as the epitome of modernity, renowned for its sleek interior complete with chrome fittings and an American bar. Lempicka not only used it as her living quarters and art studio, but also a venue for lavish cocktail parties that became the talk of gay Paris.
“The studio itself was pretty straightforward, but I love that she had this spectacular bar and library space. So, you can see from this early time that it's not just about the art she was producing, but the lifestyle and the persona behind it as well.”
According to one of her contemporaries, Lempicka loved “art and high society in equal measure.”
Of course, it wasn’t enough to project a chic, successful persona. She also had to convince affluent patrons that she had the technical ability to render an exquisite portrait of themselves, their spouses or children.
“She did that sometimes with drawings,” McNeil said, pointing out a self-portrait that Lempicka rendered in pencil.
“To see just the level of shadow and dimensionality that she's able to achieve with a pencil, it's astonishing, it really is,” McNeil observed. “This is an unfinished self-portrait, but the face is fully formed and fully realized. The bow of the lips, the dimension on the eyelids is absolutely striking. So, she could showcase her talents with work like this.”
She also painted full-scale portraits of her daughter and other subjects from her personal life to showcase her formidable skills and talent.
While her daughter, Kizette, was a captivating muse and the subject of one of Lempicka’s most alluring paintings, having an adult daughter did not jive with the artist’s carefully conceived image.
“When Lempicka first came to the United States, she came solo and she told everybody that she didn't have any children,” McNeil divulged. “She went on record in an interview saying, ‘I have no children, my paintings are my children,’ really cultivating that persona as the intense artist.”
After Kizette joined her in the United States, Lempicka kept up the charade, introducing her around as her little sister.
“So, she was very committed to this persona that she was presenting,” McNeil continued. “As you can imagine, mother and daughter had sort of a complicated relationship because of Lempicka's focus on her career and Kizette presumably feeling like she didn't have as much of her mother's attention as she would have liked.”
The Baker retrospective also contains a series of photographs that belie Lempicka’s preoccupation with the image she projected to collectors and potential patrons.
“After moving to the United States for a time, she maintained a studio back in Paris,” explained McNeil. “After World War II was over, she would make trips over there frequently. On one of those trips, she had this series of photographs taken that she was really the art director for. They are a great testament to her attention to her public image and the type of images of herself that she was interested in putting forth. They have a surrealist aspect to them in many ways.”
The surrealist tone of the photographs has a Dali-like quality.
“Even just like the disembodied light in the background and the headless, limbless sculpture and the way that she has framed her own head in juxtaposition to the sculpture replica with the veil,” McNeil continued. “It's really unique. She was not an ordinary woman, and I think what you can take away from all of these images is that they were very carefully curated by her. She was thinking in great detail about every element - from where her hands were to how she was dressed to the way the light was hitting her. She was a very careful curator of her own image in a way that was not totally common at the time.”
Influence of bisexuality on her portraiture
“Another remarkable aspect about Lempicka was her openness about her sexuality at a time when society was not as open as it would later become,” McNeil observed. “Despite being married first to Tadeusz and later to Baron Kuffner, she had affairs with both men and women throughout her lifetime and made no secret of this. And this manifests in her work in some amazing depictions of the female form. She reclaimed that genre in many ways as a female painter.”
This is particularly evident in a painting titled “Woman with Dove” or "Femme a la
colombe,” which was once in the private collection of actor Jack Nicholson (circa 1978).
“This work is her adaptation of an 18th century pastel that she has completely modernized,” observed McNeil. “So, the composition is very similar to that original source material, but this woman is unmistakably modern with her red lipstick and her arched eyebrow and that ribbon-like hair that you see in Lempicka's mature paintings. The hair is just amazing. It is iconic.”
Said Christie’s when the painting last came up for auction, “’Femme à la colombe’ encapsulates the Polish-born artist’s unique form of portraiture. Here, the model clutches a dove, a symbol of peace and love, having served as the messenger of love and desire for the goddess Aphrodite. This motif had appeared in several of Lempicka’s portraits. [These earlier works portray the dove in flight, as if reaching the figures with its message of love.] In the present work, the bird lies lifeless in the figure’s arms, poignantly suggesting as Alain Blondel has written, ‘that the love message was not heard’ (A. Blondel, Lempicka Catalogue Raisonné, 1921-1979, Lausanne, 1999, p. 497).”
The Christie’s lot essay for “Woman with Dove” also focused on the gaze of Lempicka’s unidentified, blond-haired and blue-eyed model.
“With her flawless visage framed by tumbling blonde curls and her head gently titled so to bathe in the glowing light that falls from an unseen source, the figure’s eyes stare intensely upwards in this pose of feminine elegance. This expression, described by Gioia Mori as the ‘eyes gazing heavenward’ motif, was a theme that Lempicka frequently returned to in her female portraits. This pose was inspired primarily by religious art, particularly the depictions of the Virgin or Mary Magdalene. However, as with so much of Lempicka’s portraiture, her sources were wide and varied, and this seductive female gaze, at once innocent and alluring, was at the time frequently seen in the world of contemporary cinema, both in the films themselves, and used by actresses in their press shots.”
Her cinema references included Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928), in which an intense Maria Falconetti makes strong use of this pose, and Alexandre Volkoff’s “Casanova” (1927), in which it is employed by Diana Karenne. It was a shot that was commonly used in cinema of the age, first as a physical means to express emotions that were otherwise mute, and later as a form of empathic communication with the viewer, to create a poignant and engaging message.
“This pose combined a sense of female innocence with a knowing and conscious allure,” concluded the Christie’s lot essay. “As with many of Lempicka’s portrayals of women, beyond the idealized visions of female beauty is an underlying strength, independence and resilience. In Mori’s words, ‘What Lempicka imitated was the Garbo model, a glamorous woman who concealed unusual strength and perseverance behind long eyelashes and alluring looks’ (G. Mori, ibid., p. 41).”
“Compositionally, the way she darts your eye around the canvas, from the red lips to the pink that you see in the fingernails and on the woman's nipple really activates an otherwise fairly subdued color palette,” McNeil added.
Relationship with French poet Ira Perrot
The Baker Museum retrospective shines a light on Lempicka’s long-term relationship with Ira Perrot. The French poet was part of the Paris noblesse or aristocratie, the very class from which Lempicka solicited her commissions.
“She painted many, many portraits of Ira, probably because of both her strong personal feelings for her, and also out of convenience to showcase her talents to potential patrons,” said McNeil. “It's resulted in a marvelous body of work."
Perrot was more than a putative lover and convenient muse. She was the epitome of the glamour and sensual elegance Lempicka showcased in her portraiture.
“In fact, it's thought that perhaps “The Girls” is a stylized double portrait of Lempicka with Ira, although that’s just conjecture,” said McNeil.
While the Baker Museum exhibition includes both a painting and a study in graphite, a painting that’s not part of the retrospective is perhaps a better expression of Lempicka’s underlying emotional connection to Perrot.
“Draped in a clinging white satin gown, Ira leans seductively against the edge of the picture plane holding a bouquet of calla lilies and a billowing red shawl which echoes her vermillion lips and fingernails,” says the Christie’s lot essay for this painting when it came up for auction. “In portraiture, from antiquity to today, flowers have often served as a symbol of the romantic appeal and erotic allure of the sitter. Indeed, Ira's lily-white dress accentuates her soft form, the outline of her navel and belly plainly visible as though she were nude. She appears sexy yet aloof. Ira's body turns toward the viewer, but her eyes look elsewhere, seemingly unaware of the voyeuristic gaze that her pose invites. Ira P. is as classically beautiful and exotic as the flowers she holds and like the flowers, she too is in full bloom.”
The fact that Lempicka painted her female subjects from a woman’s viewpoint adds to the overall appeal and distinctiveness of her portraits.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
