Tamara De Lempicka: A Life of Deco and Decadence

Born in 1899 to Russian aristocrats, Tamara de Lempicka escaped the Bolsheviks by exchanging her body for freedom, dramatically beginning a sexual career that included most of the influential men and women she painted. After burning brightly at the centre of Paris's artistic circle, she made her way to America in the late 1930s, where she dazzled and seduced the rich and famous of a new continent. Her paintings, like the artist herself, glow with beauty and sexuality. Contemporary critics, however, dismissed her gorgeously stylised portraits and condemned her scandalous lifestyle. A resurgence of interest in her work occurred in the 1980's, spurred by such celebrity collectors as Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand, and Madonna. In this meticulously researched, absorbing biography, Laura Claridge explores Lempicka's artistic accomplishments, her amorous adventures, and the critical judgements that at first excluded her from artistic recognition.

Chapter 1: Mythical Beginnings

By early afternoon on 19 March 1994, Christie's main auction room at 502 Park Avenue in New York City was filled to capacity. Emanating scents from the thirties--Chanel No. 5, Joy, and the newly revived Arpège--several expensive-looking women, craning their necks to study the forlorn latecomers standing in the back, seemed more interested in the company they were keeping than in the objets d'art. In the middle of the crowd, three drag queens, vamping the roaring twenties in their gold lamé gowns and feather boas, examined the lavish catalog. Their exasperated comments suggested that the presale estimates were higher than they had anticipated. For days the wealthy potential buyers (carefully targeted by Christie's thorough preregistration) had been attending publicity events--dinners and video shows--that emphasized the glamorous, high-profile nature of this sale. Christopher Burge, Christie's crisp British president, took his place at the front of the suddenly silent room, and the dais began to rotate as one exquisite object after another sold quickly, most of them for predictable prices. Gustav Stickley furniture, Tiffany lamps, Jacques Lipchitz paintings: the spotlight lent each item the Hollywood glow of the collection's owner, Barbra Streisand. As the digital board at the front of the room lit up with Japanese, French, and German currencies competing against the dollar, the wood-paneled room seemed to hum with excitement.

Suddenly a collective gasp escaped the audience. Tamara de Lempicka's Adam and Eve, painted at the end of 1931, shimmered at the front of the room, its impossibly luminous nudes confounding even those who believed themselves inured to the old-fashioned finish that pre-Modernist artists had valued so highly. Dealer Michel Witmer nodded a bit smugly; he had already provoked many arguments by contending that this painting would prove the crowning jewel of the show. In the face of his colleagues' disbelief, Witmer, adamantly maintaining that Adam and Eve was not painted on canvas, insisted that the preternatural glow of the flesh tones could only result from oil on wood. After all, he had said, "during the 1920s, Lempicka spent hours at the Louvre on a weekly basis studying what she considered the masterpieces of light and color. Clearly she was influenced by the sixteenth-century Dutch paintings that achieved a translucence in their figures partly due to painting on panels."

"What am I offered for this extraordinary panel painting by Art Deco's most famous portraitist, Tamara de Lempicka?" Mr. Burge quietly but imperiously began. As the numbers climbed rapidly from the already extravagant presale estimate of $600,000, the room filled with chatter. Promoting the painting, the auctioneer alluded to the peripatetic life that had inspired the artist's dramatic works: Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Paris, Milan, and Cuernavaca. As if on cue, a spate of international phone bids raised the price even further. When the offer reached $1 million, the room grew tense. Numbers were flying on the digital printout, and everyone watched Michel Witmer to see how far his client would go. A woman dealing by phone for her Saudi Arabian collector offered $1.25 million; turning toward Witmer, Christopher Burge intoned, "One point five?" The dealer nodded. Back to the phone: the anonymous caller raised her bid to $1.8 million. After an almost imperceptible sign from his client, Witmer shook his head, refusing the offer to exceed $1.8 million. "Going once," the audience heard, "going twice . . . sold for one point eight million dollars." With commissions added, the final sale was $1.98 million.

On that mild March afternoon when the gavel sounded in Christie's main salon, one of the twentieth century's most important and iconoclastic artists was returned to the limelight after a long hiatus. Years of comparative obscurity would yield to public scrutiny as the painter's reputation began its most significant reevaluation in over fifty years. Tamara would have loved and hated the whole affair. Money defined artistic worth in her world: she had refused to sell paintings when the offers insulted her pride. Both the sale price and the international flavor of the bidding would have pleased the painter who lived her life as a citizen of the world. But had she been accosted by the reporters on her exit from the room (as the underbidder for the painting was), she would have raged at their implication that she was being rediscovered, and at their suggestion that her talent increased in proportion to her Hollywood connection. Celebrity was something she appreciated. She had, in the late 1930s, enjoyed socializing with the members of the movie industry, but she had never thought them great judges of art. During the two years she lived in Los Angeles she was known as the Baroness with a Paintbrush, an epithet that motivated her to move to New York in the hope of reestablishing her reputation as a serious artist.

A mere four months after the auction at Christie's, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts held a Lempicka retrospective. Art historian Robert Rosenblum enthusiastically observed that Tamara was "a liberated woman and she was frankly erotic . . . a thinking woman's Léger." But in a review entitled "The Price Will Go Up, Tamara," Newsweek's art critic, Peter Plagens, referred to the painter as "practically forgotten," producing "almost soft porn," with only "eighty-four paintings known to exist." (Minimal research would have revealed the current count of almost five hundred.) Tamara, he pronounced, was "the end product, not the producer of art that influences other artists."