A Life of Deco and Decadence

Tamara De Lempicka : A Life of Deco and Decadence ^ | 1999 (second edition) | Tamara De Lempicka

[x]

The painting is not without interest, but the talk about "decadence" and the "fringes" and "the rules of normal society not applying" is a great bore. We may want to believe that yesterday's avant garde lifestyles were stimulating and transgressive and liberating and the real thing, but in the end, was decadent living really such a great thing then or now? The art may have been better or fresher, but it's doubtful that the livestyle was.

I like the line in the chronology about her adopting the style of modern art in the early sixties and beginning to work with a spatula. It may be a serious critical observation, but it reminds me too much of a Woody Allen parody.

[ikanakattara]

Thank you for posting this! These paintings are beautiful.

[ValerieUSA]

How fascinating. Decadence really had meaning back then, eh? The Clintons and their ilk have even ruined SIN for us all. What's so tempting now?

[MarkWar]

>I like the line in the chronology about her adopting the style of modern art in the early sixties and beginning to work with a spatula. It may be a serious critical observation, but it reminds me too much of a Woody Allen parody.

It's ironic that she dabbled with modern stuff, because in her early years, she explicitly chose a hard-edged, "sharp" style to set her work apart from other painters of her era, especially other women painters. No women painted the way she did, and her work was instantly identifiable as her own.

The examples I've seen of her very late work are pretty, but they look like they could have been done by anyone, and they are not striking at all.

Still, I tell myself that we can't hold what an artist does when they get old against them. Especially when they've done so much _great_ stuff in their younger years.

(And, it's hard enough for regular people to get old. Imagine what it must be like for a hipster. When they see the trends totally passing them by -- even if the trends suck compared to them -- it must be horrible. Every day, in heaven, Jim Morrison must walk over to God and shake his hand...)

Mark W.

[LaBelleDameSansMerci]

"...an interesting aspect is that although she was "decadent" her work is not cynical or depraved...."

This observation really made my antennae twitch because, in a strange way, this is an apt description of goal of so-called "nazi" art.

Appropos of nothing--does one inevitably become a mirror image of the thing one detests the most?

And then, of course, the she never has sex with the guypart is also a metaphor for the age. That "Thang" that afflicted that generation (and kept them in groceries, of course)--a generation that could, finally, in the lion's roar of winter, embrace a spatula. One can only imagine what Albert Speer might have ended up designing. Wait a minute! One doesn't have to imagine. It's standing right now in London-- The Millenium Dome!

Interesting post. Thanks for the flag.

[Bella_Bru]

WOW! These are gorgeous.....the color, the feel......I love them!

[NeoCaveman]

I don't know much about art, but these are some nice pictures.

[MarkWar]

>How fascinating. Decadence really had meaning back then, eh?

But it seems to have been -- at least in her case -- a kind of decadence something like an art-themed, adults-only version of the Friends TV show...

Here's another story from her life, and one of the pictures to come out of it:

La Bella Rafaela 1927

"Tamara had taken to finding her inspirations by walking around the famous park in Paris, the Bois de Boulogne or sitting at outdoor cafes where she would sketch people around her. "Suddenly," Tamara would say, "I became aware of a woman walking some distance in front of me. As she walks, everyone coming in the opposite direction stops and looks at her. They turn their heads as they passes by. I am curious. What is so extraordinary that they are doing this? I walk very quickly until I pass her, then I turn around and come back down the path in the opposite direction. Then I see why everyone stops. She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen - huge balck eyes, beautiful sensuous mouth, beautiful body. I stop her and say to her, "Madmoiselle I'm a painter and I would like you to come pose for me. Would you do this? She says, "Yes, why not?" And I say , "Yes, come. My car is here."

"Tamara learned that the beauty's name was Rafaela. The next day Rafaela showed up at Tamara's studio to posed for what became one of the artist's most highly praised works, Beautiful Rafaela.

"Of the sitting period Tamara said: "There was a boy who lived in the same building and whose apartment windows were opposite the windows of my studio. He watched me paint her every day, and she knew it. He fell in love with her through the window. Finally she married him, and I Iost my model!" [It's just like Friends. But with artists and, well, screwball sex...]

"The London Sunday Times Magazine called it "one of the most remarkable nudes of the century." The reason surely lies in Tamara's ability to capture her lust for her subject. The desire is palpable. She wants this woman.

Rafaela sat for Tamara de Lempicka for at least three more nudes over the next year. Rafaela admitted, "When I am alone at night, I get crazy. I go out into the street and look for men. I cannot live without a man." And she did not do it for money. She did it because she needed a man. She had to be with a man, a different man, all the time.

"Eventually the sessions ceased when Rafaela married a man who lived in the same building as the studio. His windows faced Tamara's and he fell in love with the model he saw through the glass and proposed to her. "

Quotes excerpted from Passion By Design ~ The Art And Times Of Tamara de Lempicka, By Baroness Kizette de Lempicka - Foxhall
[I believe Kizette de Lempicka is the artist's daughter]

Mark W.

[ValerieUSA]

It sounds like a bit of this is incorrect : She did it because she needed a man. She had to be with a man, a different man, all the time. -
Apparently, she did need a man, and was searching for him until he found her. She didn't need a different man, she need the right one. I can only hope Rafaela broke her old habits and they made each other happy in marriage. But does decadence ever have a happy ending?

[MarkWar]

>...this is an apt description of goal of so-called "nazi" art.
...One can only imagine what Albert Speer might have ended up designing. ...

Umm, lot of meat in that post, and because it brings up the disturbing issue of f the similarities between some aspect of Tamara's work and the Nazis' approach to art, I hope people won't mind if I put up some lengthy quotes which address these very issues.

These edited quotes are taken from chapter 3 of a book called, "Tamara de Lempicka," by Gilles Neret. (I added the bold to call attention to your points.)

"The period between the wars did indeed mark the end of the happy days of the fantasists, the dreamers, utopians, creatives and the avant garde, who had had, during the Twenties, total freedom to exercise their inventiveness and to communicate with one another from Berlin to Moscow via Paris. Now, though, they were coming to be regarded as people lacking the proper civic attidudes, egoists indulging in their private games, considdering it beneath their dignity to make themselves intelligible to the public. Art had to place itself at the disposal of all, and was no longer permitted to direct itself towards a narrow elite. After all, who was interested in the private problems of an artists or the personal gratification of a connoisseur?...

"... Gigantism was the order of the day; and the socially inspired wall-paintings in Mexico withthe cubo-syntheticist tendencies -- in the manner of Diego Rivera -- had much in common with the monuments erected by Hitler's Albert Speer, which Stalin greatly envied. The watchword was no longer "function," whether practical or economical, as in the days of the Bauhaus, of constructivism, of de Stijl or of "L'Espirit Nouveau"; what was demanded was symbolic evidence. Imposing monumentality was to be used to strike fear into the hearts of foreigners, while extravagance would reassure one's own subjects of prosperity at home. ...

" ...Arno Breker's naked, sword-flourishing warror, who dominated the Court of Honour at the new Reich Chancellery in Berlin, designed by Albert Speer and destroyed in the war, is not so far removed as one might think from the bathing-beauty brandishing a bottle of Coca Cola, nor from these grand-dukes, marquesses and other booted duchesses whose ravishing silhouettes Tamara thrust upon us, almost threatening and always perfectly turned out. ... Tamara's heroes seem to be the last representatives of a decadent world which is falling apart, in which they no longer appear as anything but shadows, parading their boredom and their conceit. The first is preparing for war, the second is creating a demand and fighting depression, while these last are closing the door on a world which will soon cease to exist. And it was here that the drama of Tamara de Lempicka would be played out, she too condemned like the others to disappear along with her creatures....

"...Nevertheless there is a certain nuance -- and not a negligible one -- which raises Tamara above all this and allows us to view her works with a fresh eye today. Giancarlo Marmoir rightly notes that one can't just lump everything together: "It would be too restrictive just to include Tamara de Lempicka in a catalogue of post-cubist and classico-deco art. The psychological and physical intensity of her subjects, their meta-anatomies and tics, not to say their grimaces, are her way of introducing the very specific exaggeration of the 'Neue Sachlichkeit.' The exaggeration, and also the hypocrisy. We find ourselves face to face not with an elegant anthropomorphic decoration or with fresco silhouettes for the Normandie or the Palais de Chaillot, but with extremely lively creatures whose innermost emotional life is sometimes brutally laid bare." ...

"...Quite obviously, Tamara's figures are not stereotypes in the manner, for example, of the beautiful kolkhoz peasant girls of the Stalin era, nor do they have the doe-eyed vacuity of the goddesses which keep cropping up in the various renditions of the Judgement of Paris, a subject which, under the brush of Hitler's favorite painters Saliger, Ziegler or Friedrich, enjoyed a veritable heyday.

"Everything, indeed,is relative, and compared with these goddesses with the vacuous stares, trampling along like a flock sheep, obviously intended only for the recreation of the warrior and for reproduction, and thus the future and the grandeur of the nation, Tamara's heroes and heroines all have some individual feature which distinguishes them from the common run of mankind....

"...The arrogance evinced by Tamara's women hits one like a slap across the face. Of course they are interested in love, or rather sex; but woe betide the partner who shows the slightest sign of weakness. They have almost nothing in common with those Venuses or Ninis who have shared the honours of the canvas throughout the history of art.

"It was Plato who, in the "Symposium," first expounded on the theory of two kinds of erotic love -- the heavenly and the mundane. ...

"...Tamara, with her feminine figures drawn from the elite, would appear to have opened up a third path..."

Not like Nazi art. Her art was focused on something quite different than the Nazi ideal(s). Her vision -- both in her life and her art -- was focused on something so unique to her (as an individual I mean, not as a gender) that I would not evaluate her in reference to the Nazi milieu, neither as an expression of it, nor as a reaction against it. Like Modigliani, I think she was an artist with an eye all her own.

Mark W.

[Victoria Delsoul]

This is my favorite one by Lempicka, "Mother Superior"

[contessa machiaveli]

notice the covers of the fountainhead and atlas shrugged. the art deco style is similar to tamara's work. both highly independent and forward thinking women. i see more of a similarity in tamara and italian modernist art, i don't see the nazi connection unless it's as a condemnation.

[MarkWar]

>notice the covers of the fountainhead and atlas shrugged. the art deco style is similar to tamara's work. both highly independent and forward thinking women. i see more of a similarity in tamara and italian modernist art, i don't see the nazi connection unless it's as a condemnation.

I don't see any Nazi connection either, and LaBelleDameSansMerci may not have actually been making one. I tend to over-react, and sometimes I react to what pushes my buttons, rather than the buttons a poster intended to push...

And you're right about the Rand comparison. The big difference -- to my eyes -- is that the Lempicka things, both her art and her life, admit to much more slap stick than anything in Rand's life or work.

For instance, here's another story for Tamara's life (that touches on the Italian modernists you mentioned):

"The ... anecdote takes place at night, in the artists' cafe 'La Coupole' in the middle of the Montparnasse, where she is in the company of futurist F. T. Marinetti. After much quaffing, along with a speech by the author of the Italian futurists' 'Manifesto,' which reaches its climax amid cries of 'Burn down the Louvre!' the whole group of poets and artists, somewhat the worse for drinks, decide to go and do just that: set fire to the symbol of the past. But, alas, the car, Tamara's alrady legendary car, which was to take this fine company thither, had disappeared. The adventure comes to a banal end in the police station, with Tamara reporting the theft of a car."

[laughs] These are people who would be more at home in a Marx Brothers movie (or a "Friends" episode) than in either Atlas Shrugged or the Fountainhead. (And, though I don't know what this says about me, I'd much rather meet Tamara than either Dagny or Dominique.)

Mark W.

[MarkWar]

>This is my favorite one by Lempicka, "Mother Superior"

Yes, I liked that picture, too. (I didn't like the actual tears, I thought the face said it all, but when Tamara visited the sisters, she was very moved, and wanted to capture her own emotion...)

It occurs to me that in this thread about Tamara de Lempicka, although I opened with her self-portrait, I haven't put up any photos of Tamara herself. So, her she is, at about 27:

Mark W.