Tamara de Lempicka – painting the Jazz Age

Auto-Portrait (1925)

Art Deco and decadence – a lovely, stylish combination. And when you throw in a spot of debauchery, it comes close to perfection.

Back in July, during a ramble around the Pompidou in Paris, we came across works by Tamara de Lempicka in the flesh (so to speak) for the first time.

While the style of her portraits is familiar – how many of them have been used as set decorations for film and TV because they instantly scream out the period? – the selection on view also included Still Life With Arums and Mirror from 1938, providing a further insight.

A few weeks later, I spotted a biography of the artist by Laura Claridge, which promised to be not just about the woman who put the art in Art Deco, but also the aforementioned debauchery, which winning combination marked it out as potentially excellent holiday reading.

It is indeed a very interesting read about an intriguing character who, a tad like Garbo – who she adored and was acquainted with – managed to keep the details of her personal life largely hidden, leaving Claridge with the mammoth task of digging around for evidence.

The nature of de Lempicka’s life also means that there’s a good deal of reliance on newspaper society reports.

Even the year of her birth was difficult to uncover, but is now believed to be 1898. Although a Pole, she lived for some time in her early life in St Petersburg and was there, married to Tadeusz Łempicki and living it up among the upper echelons of that society, utterly unaware of the suffering of millions, when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917.

Fleeing to Paris, de Lempicka decided that she could make a living as an artist and, by 1925, had her first major solo show in Milan.

Tutored by André Lhote, she developed what has been described as ‘soft cubism’, which she combined with vivid colour (although her portraits work within a deliberately limited palette), an intriguing framing of her subjects and a textural finish that was straight out of her beloved Italian Quattrocento.

Portrait of the Marquis d'Afflito (1925)

It was a style that perfectly suited the Jazz Age and has come to exemplify it, combining both a measured coolness and a very direct sexuality.

Indeed, she made full use of the sort of direct gaze that we see in Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia (both 1863) and if, by de Lempicka’s time, it was not as likely to cause offense, it still acts as a challenge to the viewer.

It’s present perhaps most famously in Auto-Portrait (1925) – a self-portrait in a Bugatti – which has become an icon of Deco.

But even when the gaze is elsewhere, that hardly changes the sexual nature of many of the pictures, such as in Andromeda (1929), which makes a rather nod toward bondage.

And when, as in The Model (1925), the central figure is actually hiding her face, there can still be no doubting the sexual nature of the picture.

The likes of Perspective (1923) and Group of Four Nudes (1925) are unambiguously sexual in nature, from the facial expressions to the position of the hand on thigh in the former.

But de Lempicka was not just a portraitist – society or otherwise – or a painter of nudes, as her still lives and later, her surrealist and abstract works, show.

Group of Four Nudes (1925)

She went out of fashion for a number of reasons. Partly, because in the post-war world, living in the US, her style didn’t suit the new art climate of abstraction, and in part too, because her position as a socialite was out of touch with the mood.

The latter was absolutely her own fault. Late in her life, Claridge quotes her as regretting all the socialising, which reduced the time she spent painting.

When she was covered in the papers later in her life, it was more for what she served at her parties than for what she served up on canvas, while even decades after leaving for the States, she was almost blanked in Paris by women who remembered the tales of her debauchery.

And a linking in the popular mind of her style of paintings with fascism, however unfairly, didn’t help either.

Some of the post-Jazz Age works – including a famous portrait of a crying Mother Superior (1935) – lapse into a mawkish sentimentality, although La Fuite (1939), featuring a distraught mother with child as storm clouds gather, at least shows not only that she was aware of the coming war but of the impending human tragedy that it would mean.

But the Deco works are superb, and the still lives are excellent too.

Claridge does well with the limited factual information about de Lempicka’s life, in more than one case avoiding the temptation to simply accept established stories in favour of digging deeper.

But there are also times when she makes generalised statements that are simply opinions.

Still Life With a Chair (1942)

For instance, Claridge rightly points out that female artists in the Paris of the early 20th century were regarded highly by and accepted within the art circles of the day – and achieved wider critical success too.

But in terms of that acceptance, she suggests that female artists were expected to engage in the Bohemian life of that community in the city at that time.

Now it might sound rather minor, but the idea – however slight a suggestion it is – that female artists in general had their sexual behavior guided by a desire to be accepted by men rather than by their own desires and the opportunity to enjoy sexual adventures in a much more liberated atmosphere than elsewhere in the society of the day, falls into the trap of attempting to see everything through a certain type of feminist lens.

Some may have felt obliged; others may not.

In the case of de Lempicka – and that is who this book is about – there is no doubt that, sexually, she was entirely her own woman.

She was also undoubtedly a difficult personality – and an absolute bitch to her daughter, Kizette – but then how many great artists or geniuses are ‘normal’?

Claridge’s book is an engaging, informative read. My major complaint is that, although the pages are liberally peppered with black and white illustrations of de Lempicka and her family, there is only a very small section of colour plates, giving only a very small idea of her actual work.

It’s almost as though the author and publishers have fallen into the same kind of reporting of their subject as Claridge notes in the text. And with a lack of titles for whole stages of her work, it’s not easy to track down images online.

So I recommended reading this alongside the Taschen large format De Lempicka, by Gilles Néret, since the pre-Claridge text is accompanied by a mass of beautifully reproduced pictures.

Modern art in its pomp, I do like

Les Quatre Races, Ozenfant

Another day, another gallery. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, since we took a day off on the Thursday, heading for the Jardin des Plantes to amble among flower beds and the menagerie (I saw a baby vulture!), enjoy a decent lunch and, frankly, get absolutely toasted in the glorious sunshine.

But with rain promised for the Friday, we had planned for the Pompidou, which was a mere 10 minutes away on foot from the garret.

There was no need to fret about queues: a relatively short one disappeared quickly within minutes of the centre opening its doors at 11am, while we sat opposite supping coffees at a café.

Europe, de la Serna

On our previous visit, we’d seen an exhibition on architect Richard Rodgers, who had co-designed the Pompidou itself, and had also taken in some of the most modern exhibits.

Now to be quite frank, I have little memory of what we saw of the latter – other than a Jackson Pollock – because my feet were in the process of murdering me.

So this time, I was determined to see the key collection covering the 70 years of the 20th century.

Thus we headed to the top of the building to find ourselves at the start of a walk into artistic modernity.

It begins with two works by artists previously unknown to me.

First, straight ahead as you enter, is Les Quatre Races, a vast piece by Amédée Ozenfant from 1928, which uses highly simplified human forms and interesting, architectural textures to create an optimistic view of a post-WWI future.

Girl With a Black Cat, Matisse

The architectural aspect is not surprising when you read that Ozenfant was, with Le Corbusier, a co-founder of the Purist movement.

However, we then find Ismaël de la Serna’s Europe – painted in around 1935, as Spain was on the cusp of the civil war – and this is something altogether less hopeful: a view of a continent being handed, once again, to death.

It’s a disturbing canvas, brilliantly executed.

Beyond that, one of the next things to see was a Matisse canvas – Girl With a Black Cat (1910), which was posed by his daughter, Marguerite, and had been in a private collection until last year.

And through a door next to it was an entire room – albeit a small one – full of nothing but works by Matisse, including Portrait of Auguste Pellerin II (1916-17) and Portrait de Greta Prozor (1916).

Femme nue couché, Picasso

Beyond that was a larger room, hung on one long wall with a couple of dozen paintings, like the rooms of early 20th-century Parisian collectors such as the Steins.

High up were a couple of works by artists who were very clearly trying to emulate Matisse and, in effect, reproduce the likes of Luxe, Calme et Volupté and others.

The colours merely managed to look garish – providing an excellent illustration of just how good Matisse really was.

We avoided the one tour party that was breezing through and then enjoyed another Matisse.

Still Life With Arums & Mirror, de Lempicka

Luxe I, which was painted in 1907, provided an opportunity to appreciate what I’d learned when reading Hilary Spurling’s excellent Matisse biography.

In this case, the hills in the background are those marking the south of Collioure, while it was painted in the hills above the village, beyond the railway line, because the rather religious inhabitants would not have been impressed by nude models.

Moving through initial rooms, the art gradually abstracted, while The Other Half got vaguely excited by a replica of the Tatlin Tower.

And since the museum was so generally quiet, it was with great pleasure that we able to sit down and contemplate Picasso’s Femme nue couchée (1936) without interruption for some time.

Perhaps I’m wrong or simply linking the blue of the Blue Period rather too greatly with Picasso’s entire oeuvre, but the green background seemed to lend the work a very different tone to many of those I’ve seen.

The Journalist Sylvia von Harden, Dix

Since you cannot go wrong with a spot of Art Deco, I also enjoyed seeing works by Tamara de Lempicka, and while the portrait style might be familiar, It was nice to see Still Life with Arums and Mirror (1938), which showed the style in a less-familiar way.

We also found Otto Dix’s iconic and absolutely wonderful Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden from 1926, which seems to so utterly represent the Weimar period that it’s no surprise that it was recreated fleetingly in the opening titles of the 1972 film of Cabaret.

Henry Valensi’s Symphonie verte from 1935 and Symphonie vitale from 1952 are both non-figurative canvases that I took to instantly, simply because he makes the colours work so well.

These were works that further increase the question in my own mind of just what constitutes ‘art’, and I see no reason why decorative works are not, in some minds, considered as highly as figurative.

Symphonie Verte, Valensi

We found a Max Beckmann – an artist we’d first really encountered at a Tate Modern exhibition some years ago – and Édouard Pignon, whose paintings we’d discovered at the Museum of Modern Art in Collioure, just last summer.

If there was a disappointment, it was that we didn't see any of the Centre’s works by Léopold Survage – but you can't have everything.

In another gallery, we came across an industrial scene by Bernard Boutet de Monvel (1881-1949), a French fashion illustrator and society portraitist.

View of Pont-Aven, de Monvel

His View of Pont-Aven (1928) is hardly an obvious fit with that sort of portfolio, but it is a striking image that made me think of Metropolis. It has an interesting perspective and use of angles that creates movement in an apparently deserted – dehumanised – industrial landscape.

In the same room were two canvases by Alexandre Hogue (1898-1994), an American painter whose work focused particularly on landscapes during the Dust Bowl, with an ecological message at its core.

Drought Survivors from 1936 has a naive style that completely belies its theme, with signs of man-made life dead or rusting as the man-made ecological disaster rolls in.

Petrol in the Dunes (1944) may not have the same immediately haunting impact, but it’s still a striking and impressive work with the same underlying ethos.

Drought Survivors, Hogue

The entire floor has been recast in recent years under a heading of ‘multiple modernities’, which seeks to explore modern art from across the world and also by there: there is, for instance, a room dedicated to anti-fascist art.

Tarsila do Amaral – usually known simply as Tarsila – is considered one of the most important figures in Brazilian art.

Her A cuca (1924) is another deceptively naïve work, but stays in the mind – and is certainly shown off particularly well in a snakeskin frame that was made especially for it at the time.

A cuca, Tarsila

The way in which the works have been organised does create surprises.

It was more than a tad unexpected to round one corner and find yet another Matisse – this time, Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background (1925-26), which presented an opportunity to look at how the artist incorporated his love of decorative fabrics into his own works.

Brought up in a weaving area of northern France, Matisse later collected and carried around with him snippets of fabric that he had spotted and liked.

The final corridor, which takes you back to where you started, brings with it several pleasures – not least, Picasso’s Woman in a Turkish Turban (1955) and Giorgio di Chirico’s Il Ritornante (1918), which has all the typical strangeness of that painter’s metaphysical works.

Il Ritornante, de Chirico

Unfortunately, the light from the windows makes it difficult to really see one of Dalí’s myriad masturbation paintings. Perhaps that was a deliberate little joke on the subject matter?

And to finish, a pair of Chagall’s, one of which, Double Portrait with a Glass of Wine (1918) showed him ‘riding’ on the shoulders of his wife as way of showing how she made him feel.

We were delighted to be able to ‘get’ it without looking at the labels, on the basis of what we’d discovered at last year’s Liverpool Tate exhibition.

The Pompidou serves up a wonderful walk through the first 70 years of the 20th century – and three hours had been whiled away so easily and pleasantly.

And it also leaves the visitor with plenty to think about.

Portrait With a Glass of Wine, Chagall

To talk of ‘modern art’ is, really, such a dreadfully clumsy way of indiscriminately lumping together myriad different styles and approaches to myriad different subjects and questions.

That might not be what the Pompidou was attempting specifically to address with its exhibition title of ‘multiple modernities,’ but it is certainly one way of looking at such a wide range of artistic endeavour over almost three quarters of a century.

Picking just a handful of pictures of the works we saw to illustrate this post is evidence of the breath of ‘modern art’ – and that doesn’t even bring us slap bang up to date.

By the time we were ready to conclude our visit, we’d not seen anywhere near all the exhibits, but I had reached a point of recognising a Rothko but feeling no great need to go and examine it in detail. 

But while a stand-alone trip is hardly problematic, a visit to the Pompidou is a perfect way to continue an exploration of the modern that began with some of the art that’s on display in the Musée d’Orsay, given that Manet is seen as the painter who began ‘modern art’.