The Sleeping Girl
1923
Oil on canvas, 89 × 146 cm
Private Collection
Refugees from the Russian Revolution fanned out across the globe, but Paris which had long been a second home to well-healed Russians, became a Mecca for White Russians in the inter war period. Inevitably Tamara and Tadeusz were drawn there along with Tamara’s mother and younger sister (her brother was one of the millions of casualties of the war). Unlike so many refugees who arrived there penniless and friendless they could at least rely upon help from Aunt Stefa and her husband who had managed to retain some of his wealth and to re-establish himself in his former career as a banker.
Perspective
1923
Oil on canvas, 130 × 162 cm
Musée du Petit Palais, Genève
From the turn of the century the political alliance between Russia and France – aimed at containing the menace of Wilhelmine Germany – encouraged the growth of cultural links between the two countries. The great impresario Sergei Diaghilev took advantage of this political climate to establish himself in Paris. In 1906, Diaghilev organised an exhibition of Russian portraits at the Grand Palais that pioneered a more imaginative presentation of paintings and sculptures. Following this success, he arranged concerts that for the first time presented to the French public the music of such composers as Glazunov, Rachmaninov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky and Scriabin.
The Gypsy
c. 1923
Oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm
Private Collection
Diaghilev’s designers, notably Leon Bakst, played a vital role in developing the Art Deco style with which de Lempicka became associated. In particular Bakst’s designs for the 1910 production of Sheherazade had an extraordinary impact on fashion and interior design. For the next generation, fashionable Parisian hostesses dressed themselves and decorated their salons as though for an oriental orgy. Even in the late 1920s, photographs of Tamara de Lempicka’s bedrooms show decors which, though much pared down from the lushness of Bakst’s designs, make them look as if Nijinsky’s sex slave would not be out of place as an overnight guest.
Woman in a Black Dress
1923
Oil on canvas, 195 × 60.5 cm
Private Collection
Paris in the inter-war period was teeming with Russian refugees. It was jokingly said that every second taxi driver in Paris was either a real or pretend Grand Duke.
De Lempicka’s early years in Paris were not happy. Though never reduced to the penury of so many of her refugee compatriots, she was nevertheless dependent upon the largesse of her wealthier relations. Despite the birth of her daughter Kizette, Tamara’s love match with Tadeusz was turning sour as a result of her own infidelities and his frustrations. He refused as demeaning the offer of a job in her uncle’s bank. According to her own account it was out of this grim situation and a desire for financial and personal independence that de Lempicka’s artistic vocation was born.
Double “47”
c. 1924
Oil on panel, 46 × 38 cm
Private Collection
Tamara confessed her plight to her younger sister Adrienne, resulting in the following conversation between the sisters; – “Tamara, why don’t you do something – something of your own? Listen to me, Tamara. I am studying architecture. In two years I’ll be an architect, and I’ll be able to make my own living and even help out Mama. If I can do this, you can do something too” “What? What? What?” “I don’t know, painting perhaps. You can be an artist. You always loved to paint. You have talent. That portrait you did of me when we were children….” The rest, as they say, was history. Tamara bought the brushes and paints, enrolled in an art school, sold her first pictures within months and made her first million (francs) by the time she was twenty-eight.
Portrait of Kizette
c. 1924
Oil on canvas, 135 × 57 cm
Private Collection
Tamara took herself for tuition to two distinguished painters in succession: Maurice Denis (1870–1943) and André Lhote (1885–1962). De Lempicka later claimed that she did not gain much from Denis. It is indeed difficult to imagine that the intensely Catholic Denis would have been much in sympathy with the worldly, modish and erotic tendencies that soon began to display themselves in Tamara’s work. Nevertheless Denis was an intelligent initial choice as a teacher for the aspiring artist. For a brief period in the early 1890s Denis had been at the cutting edge of early modernism as a leading member of the Nabis group that included Vuillard, Bonnard, Serusier, Ranson and Vallotton.
Rhythm
1924
Oil on canvas, 160 × 144 cm
Private Collection
Inspired by the Synthetism of Gauguin’s Breton paintings, Denis and his friends broke with the naturalism of Salon painting and the very different naturalism of the Impressionists who were tied to sensory perception and painted small pictures in flat patches of bright, exaggerated colours. However the firm linearity and smooth modelling of the forms in Denis’ later works as well as his attempts to marry modernity with the classical tradition can hardly have failed to influence the young de Lempicka. The aesthetic expressed by Denis in his 1909 publication From Gauguin and Van Gogh to Classicism was surely one with which she would have agreed. “Art is not simply a visual sensation that we receive… a photograph however sophisticated of nature. No, it is a creation of the mind, for which nature is merely the springboard.” This is surely true of de Lempicka’s strangely cerebral and abstracted portraits of the 1920s.
Irene and Her Sister
1925
Oil on canvas, 146 × 89 cm
Irena Hochman Fine Art Ltd, New York
De Lempicka was far more ready to acknowledge the influence of her second teacher André Lhote. Whilst Denis must have seemed like a relic of the nineteenth century, Lhote, born in 1885, was not much more than a decade older than de Lempicka herself and was much closer to her modern and worldly outlook. Lhote had been associated with cubism since 1911 when he exhibited at the Salon des Independents and the Salon d’Automne alongside artists such as Jean Metzinger, Roger de La Fresnaye, Albert Gleizes and Fernand Leger. Rather than following the radical experiments in the dissolution of form in Picasso and Braque’s Analytical Cubism, he was attracted to the brightly coloured and more