Lempicka and artworks E-Book

Patrick Bade

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 91

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

The smoothly metallic portraits, nudes and still lifes of Tamara de Lempicka encapsulate the spirit of Art Deco and the Jazz Age, and reflect the elegant and hedonistic life-style of a wealthy, glamorous and privileged elite in Paris between the two World Wars. Combining a formidable classical technique with elements borrowed from Cubism, Lempicka’s art represented the ultimate in fashionable modernity while looking back for inspiration to such master portraitists as Ingres and Bronzino. This book celebrates the sleek and streamlined beauty of her best work in the 1920s and 30s. It traces the extraordinary life story of this talented and glamorous woman from turn of the century Poland and Tsarist Russia, through to her glorious years in Paris and the long years of decline and neglect in America, until her triumphant rediscovery in the 1970s when her portraits gained iconic status and world-wide popularity.

Leseprobe

Patrick Bade

© 2023, Confidential Concepts, Worldwide, USA

© 2023, Parkstone Press USA, New York

© Image-Barwww.image-bar.com

© 2005 de Lempicka Estate / Artists Rights Society, New York, USA / ADAGP, Paris

All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world.

Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

ISBN: 978-1-78160-823-4

Contents

BIOGRAPHY

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

A

A Street at Night,c. 1923

Adam and Eve,1931

Amethyst,1946

Arlette Boucard with Arums,1931

Arums,1931

Arums,c. 1931

At the Opera,1941

B

Beggar with Mandolin,1935

Bouquet of Hortensias and Lemon,c. 1922

D

Double “47”, c. 1924

G

Graziella, c. 1937

Group of Four Nudes,c. 1925

H

Head of Slavic Woman,c. 1925

High Summer,1928

I

Idyll,1931

Irene and Her Sister,1925

K

Kizette in Pink,c. 1926

Kizette on the Balcony,1927

L

La Belle Rafaëla, 1927

M

Madonina,c. 1934

Madonna,c. 1937

Maternity,1928

Mother and Child,1931

N

Nana de Herrera, 1928-1829

New York, c. 1929

Nude on a Terrace,1925

Nude with Buildings,1930

Nude with Dove,1928

Nude with Sailboats,1931

Nude, Blue Background,1923

P

Peasant Girl with Pitcher,c. 1937

Perspective, 1923

Portrait of a Man or Mr. Tadeusz de Lempicki,1928

Portrait of a Man with His Collar Turned Up,c. 1931

Portrait of a Polo Player,c. 1922

Portrait of a Young Lady in a Blue Dress,1922

Portrait of André Gide,c. 1925

Portrait of Arlette Boucard,1928

Portrait of Baroness Renata Treves,1925

Portrait of Count Vettor Marcello,c. 1933

Portrait of Doctor Boucard,1928

Portrait of His Imperial Highness Grand Duke Gabriel,c. 1926

Portrait of Ira P, 1930

Portrait of Kizette,c. 1924

Portrait of Marjorie Ferry,1932

Portrait of Marquis Sommi,1925

Portrait of Miss Poum Rachou,1933

Portrait of Mrs. Allan Bott,1930

Portrait of Mrs. Boucard,1931

Portrait of Mrs. Bush,1929

Portrait of Mrs. M, 1932

Portrait of Pierre de Montaut, 1931

Portrait of Prince Eristoff,1925

Portrait of Romana de La Salle, 1928

Portrait of Suzy Solidor,1933

Portrait of the Count of Fürstenberg-Herdringen,1928

Portrait of the Duchess of La Salle,1925

Portrait of the Marquis d’Afflito (On a Staircase),1926

Portrait of the Marquis d’Afflito,1925

Q

Quattrocento,1937

R

Redheaded Girl and Garland of Roses,c. 1944

Rhythm,1924

S

Saint Anthony, c. 1936

Saint Moritz,1929

Seated Nude in Profile,c. 1923

Seated Nude,1925

Seated Nude,c. 1923

Seated Nude,c. 1925

Seft-Portrait in the Green Bugatti,1929

Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti, 1929

Sharing Secrets,1928

Sleeping Girl,c. 1930

Spring,1930

Still Life with Apples and Lemons,c. 1946

Still Life with Arums and Mirror,c. 1938

Still Life, Lemons and Plate,c. 1942

Succulent and Flask,c. 1941

Suzanne Bathing, c. 1938

T

The Blue Hour,1931

The Blue Scarf,1930

The Blue Virgin,1934

The Breton Girl,1934

The Brilliance,c. 1932

The Chinese Man, c. 1921

The Communicant,1928

The Convalescent, 1932

The Dream,1927

The Fortune Teller,c. 1922

The Girls,c. 1930

The Green Turban,1929

The Gypsy,c. 1923

The Key,c. 1946

The Kiss,c. 1922

The Model,1925

The Mother Superior,1935

The Musician, 1929

The Orange Scarf, 1927

The Orange Turban II,c. 1945

The Peasant Man,c. 1937

The Pink Shirt I,c. 1927

The Pink Tunic,1927

The Polish Girl,1933

The Refugees,1931

The Rose Hat,c. 1944

The Seashell,1941

The Slave,1929

The Sleeping Girl (Kizette) I,c. 1933

The Sleeping Girl,1923

The Straw Hat,1930

The Telephone II,1930

The Two Girlfriends,1930

Two Little Girls with Ribbons,1925

W

Wide Brimmed Hat,1933

Woman in a Black Dress,1923

Woman in a Yellow Dress,1929

Woman Wearing a Shawl, in Profile,c. 1922

Woman with a Green Glove,1928

Woman with Dove,1931

Women Bathing,1929

Y

Young Lady with Crossed Arms,1939

Young Lady with Gloves,1930

Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti, 1929

Oil on panel, 35 x 27 cm. Private Collection

Biography

1898

Born Tamara Gurwik-Gorska in Warsaw to wealthy, upper-class Polish parents. Her father, Bolris Gorski, was a lawyer with a French firm. Her mother was Malvina Decler.

1911

A trip to Italy with her grandmother helps Tamara discover her passion for art.

1914

Tamara moves in with her aunt Stephanie in St Petersburg, resenting her mother’s decision to remarry. She meets her future husband, Tadeusz Lempicki, a handsome lawyer from a wealthy Russian family.

1916

Tamara and Tadeusz marry in Petrograd in the chapel of the Knights of Malta.

1917

Russia is engulfed in revolution after the rise of the Bolsheviks and the new regime.

1918

Tadeusz is arrested as a counter-revolutionary. Tamara enlists the help of the Swedish consul to help him escape. They both manage to flee the country and are reunited in Paris, their home for the next 20 years.

1920

Birth of Kizette de Lempicka. Tamara takes classes with Maurice Denis and Andre Lhote. She takes the name Tamara de Lempicka and begins to develop her worldly, modish and erotic style.

1922

She sells her first paintings from the Gallerie Colette Weill, later exhibiting her work for the first time at the Salon d’Automne in Paris.

1925

De Lempicka makes a name for herself with a one woman show at the Bottega di Poesia in Milan and at the world’s first Art Deco exhibition, held in Paris. The German fashion magazine Die Dame commissions one of her most famous paintings, the Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti.

1926

The great Italian poet and playwright, Gabriele d’Annunzio, makes a failed attempt to seduce de Lempicka at his villa on the Italian coastline.

1927

De Lempicka completes several controversial paintings of her daughter Kizette. She meets the beautiful Rafaela in the Bois de Boulogne who inspires some of her most sensuous and erotic works.

1928

She begins work on her Boucet family commissions and paints a portrait of her husband Tadeusz before their divorce later in the year. She meets Baron Raoul Kuffner and moves into a spacious apartment in rue Méchain designed by the fashionable modernist architect Robert Mallet-Stevens.

1929

De Lempicka becomes Kuffner’s mistress and makes her first trip to America.

1933

She marries Baron Kuffner. Her work and creativity suffer after the sobering realities of Hitler’s ascension to power in Germany and the Wall Street Crash. She enters a long period of depression.

1939

De Lempicka and Baron Kuffner move to America and settle in Los Angeles after Kuffner sells off most of his Austrian and Hungarian estates. De Lempicka continues to paint and slips easily into the glamorous world of Hollywood high society.

1942

Tired of their life in Hollywood, Kuffner insists they move back to New York. Kizette joins them in America where she meets her husband, Harold Foxhall, a geologist from Texas.

1943

Her new life as a New York socialite detracts from her art. Her figurative paintings and experiments with abstract expressionism fail to attract any interest. Her career begins to stall and she fades slowly into obscurity.

1962

Baron Kuffner dies. A distraught de Lempicka moves in with her daughter and husband in Houston.

1973

A renewed interest in her work leads to a hugely successful retrospective show of her work at the Galerie du Luxembourg.

1974

Her fame restored, she moves in with her daughter in Cuernavaca, Mexico, living the rest of her life marred by her irascibility in her dealings with her family and the rest of the world.

1980

Tamara de Lempicka dies on March 18th leaving instructions for her ashes to be scattered over the crater of the volcano Popocatepetl.

The Chinese Man, c. 1921

Oil on canvas, 35 x 27 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts du Havre

Tamara de Lempicka created some of the most iconic images of the twentieth century. Her portraits and nudes of the years 1925-1933 grace the dust jackets of more books than the work of any other artist of her time. Publishers understand that in reproduction, these pictures have an extraordinary power to catch the eye and kindle the interest of the public. In recent years, the originals of the images have fetched record sums at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Beyond the purchasing power of most museums, these paintings have been eagerly collected by film and pop stars. In May 2004, the Royal Academy of Arts in London staged a major show of de Lempicka’s work just one year after she had figured prominently in another big exhibition of Art Deco at the Victoria and Albert museum.

The public flocked to the show despite a critical reaction of unprecedented hostility towards an artist of such established reputation and market value. In language of moral condemnation hardly used since Hitler’s denunciations of modern art at the Nuremberg rallies and the Nazi-sponsored exhibition of Degenerate Art, the art critic of the Sunday Times, Waldemar Januszczak, fulminated “I had assumed her to be a mannered and shallow peddler of Art Deco banalities. But I was wrong about that. Lempicka was something much worse. She was a successful force for aesthetic decay, a melodramatic corrupter of a great style, a pusher of empty values, a degenerate clown and an essentially worthless artist whose pictures, to our great shame, we have somehow contrived to make absurdly expensive.”

According to Januszczak, de Lempicka did not arrive in Paris in 1919 as an innocent refugee from the Russian Revolution but on a sinister mission, intending “an assault on human decency and the artistic standards of her time”. One cannot help wondering what it was about de Lempicka’s art that should bring down upon it such hysterical vituperation. There is a clue perhaps in his waspish observation “Luther Vandross collects her, apparently. Madonna. Streisand. That type.” The hostility is perhaps more politically than aesthetically motivated and what really got under the skin of certain critics was the glamorous life style of Tamara’s collectors as well as of her sitters.