Patrick Bade
Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon

Patrick Bade | Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon | 06.08.22

Visuals displayed and music played throughout the presentation.

- Right. So this is the glamorous Tamara de Lempicka. You can see her on the right painting, a portrait of her feckless and faithless husband. And on the left, she actually painted this as a magazine cover, and it apparently shows her at the wheel of a green Bugatti. But she didn’t actually have a Bugatti. She had a little Citroen car, but that was already quite something for a woman in the 1920s to have the independence of having a car. Now, in 2005, there was an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Tamara de Lempicka. And this is what the critic of the Sunday Times, Waldemar Januszczak said about it. He said that he thought her art was a successful force for aesthetic decay, a melodramatic corrupter of a great style, a pusher of empty values, a degenerate, and that she was a degenerate clown. De Lempicka was a liar, a snob, a fraud. Tamara Gurwik-Górska pretended all her life that she was born in Warsaw. She probably did this because her father was a Jew, something she was ashamed of. Anyone in slavic circles hearing the name Gurwik and knowing she came from Moscow would’ve identified this Jewishness immediately.

Well, I find that very unpleasant. Maybe I’m oversensitized, but to me, that has a very strong whiff of antisemitism about it. The language uses really over the top language using words like corrupter, degenerate. This is the language that the Nazis used against Jewish intellectuals and artists in the 1930s. Now, she’s not for everybody. You could say she’s a bit of a Marmite artist. People love her or they hate her. But what you have to give her is that she gives us a portrait of a period and of a class. And in that sense, you could compare her to Scott Fitzgerald. And they’re looking at a similar kind of class, a very- It’s an international wealthy group of people, very elegant, very smart. It’s what the French called Les Années Folles, and what the American called the jazz age. Here is Tamara’s very handsome, and as we shall hear, rather feckless husband on the left-hand side. And this woman, she’s called Ira Perrot, was an on/off lover of Tamara as well. So super cool glamorous images. And it’s amazing how many novels of the period get republished with images by Tamara de Lempicka on the cover. There are images that are really striking that grab your attention from the other side of the room.

Here she is again, super cool. Of course it’s very, very cool between the wars, as we know, from Hollywood films to hold a cigarette like this and to smoke. Now, what I’m going to do, I want to give you a pic of her, but I want to place her in her period, and I want to give you a picture of the period. So as we go along, I’m going to play you songs of the period that she certainly would’ve known. We know she had a gramophone. She liked playing gramophone records. It was the big star, the biggest musical star in Paris in the 1920s when Tamara was there, was Mistinguett. She was the queen of the musical. And this is a song, “Paris, c'est une blonde”, Paris is a blonde woman. And it expresses all that hedonism of the 1920s of the jazz age of Les Années Folles People trying to put the First World War behind them. They just want to have a very good time.

♪ Music plays ♪

These are stills from a news real clip for Pathé News of dating from 1930 that shows her. You can find this on the internet, you’ll find it if you Google it or go on YouTube. It’s quite short, it’s fascinating. Shows her looking super, super elegant. You see, this is her studio in a modern block of flats designed by the architect Robert Mallet Stevens. And we see her sitting down to dinner and she has a last cigarette, which she stubs out. And then her butler, her very smartly dressed butler, brings her dinner to her under on a silver salver. So that in itself is a fascinating period piece. So one thing that Waldemar Januszczak says about her has an element of truth. She was a great self mythologizer. Nothing she really says about herself can be taken literally, but we don’t- Well, like many women of her period, she lied about her age.

So we don’t know really when she was born. And she may or may not have been born in Warsaw. She was born into quite a wealthy family, and they went to live in St. Petersburg. And one night when she was just a teenager at the opera, she saw this very handsome man Tadeusz de Lempicki, and very typically, and this is how she describes it, she took one look and thought, “That’s it. I’ll have him, he’s for me.” And she went out and got- She had a very rather masculine really approach to sex and love. She wasn’t in the least bit passive. She got what she wanted. Well, they of course were caught up in the Russian Revolution. He was arrested and imprisoned. She claims that she had to sleep with the Swedish ambassador to get a visa to get him out of Russia. And then like so many Russian exiles, they settled in Paris. There’s a very large Russian community there. And he was a bit of a waste, he didn’t really want to work.

I mean, they weren’t dead poor, but they weren’t… They weren’t wealthy as they had been. So Paris, as I said, this is the Paris of Les Années Folles, Everybody really wants to, is out to have a good time. It’s the pleasure capital of the world. This is a book I picked up in a junk shop in Islington, near where I live, Paris Leste. It says Georges Sim. That’s Simenon who is more famous, of course, as the writer of detective novels. And Paris Leste, it’s naughty Paris. So it’s a guide to all the sort of wicked things that you could do in Paris in the 1920s. And as I said, there was a very large Russian community. Pretty well the entire Russian aristocracy decamped to Paris. Some kept their wealth, but most lost it. So it was a kind of a joke that every other taxi driver in Paris in the 1920s was a former Russian aristocrat or Grand Duke. And they hired themselves out as Butlers and ladies maids. And that was a theme of a very popular play of the period, period called Tovarich, which was made into a film twice, a British film and a Hollywood film with Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert.

Now, the way that Tamara tells it, and I said, you can never really be absolutely sure that she’s telling the truth. And this doesn’t really have the ring of truth to me. She says, she was thinking, “Oh, I’ve got to do something, what can I do? And then one day my sister said to me, ‘Oh, well, when you were a little girl, you used to draw very well, why don’t you train as an artist, and maybe you can earn a living as an artist?’” Well, two things about this don’t quite ring true to me. First of all, you know, to just decide to be an artist, to make a living as an artist is a very difficult thing. It’s difficult now, and it was very difficult then. In fact, she did for a while. She made a very good living, she made quite a lot of money. But that was certainly not necessarily a reason to become an artist. And the other thing is that she was very devoted to her art, really. I mean she for a short period, seven years, she was very fashionable and everybody wanted her work.

But for the rest of her life, I mean, she fell out of fashion in the late 1930s. And if she hadn’t really had a strong vocation, I think she would’ve given up her art. But she continued to paint right up till the time she died. So anyway, she decided to become an artist. Who should she go to? There were various ateliers of well-known artists where you could sign up in Paris. One was called the Atelier Ranson. Ranson was a minor member of the Nabi group, but at the Atelier Ranson, he had teaching for him, the very well-known artist, Maurice Denis. And here are two paintings by Maurice Denis. And you can look at them and you can see, what did she get from him? Well, I think she got this rather sculptural treatment of the figures. Very smooth paint surface, strongly linear style. So I think she actually got probably quite a lot from him. You know, as well in learning how to draw in a classical way. But he must have seemed a bit old-fashioned, a bit fuddy duddy. So after a while she changed her allegiance. Having, I think, acquired a good basic academic technique from him, she moved on to a cubist artist called André Lhote. This is André Lhote.

These days, I suppose considered quite a minor figure. You could, you know, pick up something by him at auction, I think for a lot less than you could pick up a Tamara de Lempicka. But he’s a cubist, but he’s a sort of decorative cubist. And that’s her style really is a kind of decorative cubism. Compare and contrast here, this is Tamara top left and André Lhote. So you can see yes, she’s certainly got a lot from him. And so this is a painting of 1923. It’s an academic nude. It’s a kind of study that every artist did in Paris when they’re learning students. Very chunky, very sculptural as I said. And I think like everybody at this time, she’s certainly paying attention to Cézanne and Cézanne’s news. There’s a detail of a Cézanne on the left-hand side and Tamara on the right-hand side. And also, of course Picasso is the god of the Avant-Garde. She knew him personally. I mean I don’t think they were close friends, but they did socialise as they met at smart clubs like Le Boeuf sur le Toit. So she, I think would, she’d certainly looked at his work, she’d looked at his primitivist works like the one top left. And she looked at his cubist works. I don’t think she took a lot. I think her borrowings from cubism, as in this picture for instance, this is the first picture that she exhibited publicly.

This was shown in 1923 at the Salon d'automne. It has two titles, Perspective or Two Friends. I would describe this picture as cubified, rather than cubist. She’s just adopted in a rather superficial way certain elements of cubism, particularly in the background without really absorbing the basic principles of cubism. And it’s a kind of rather sexy, you can see would’ve been an appealing subject for many men in particular, I think, although I think it probably shows a pair of women lovers, a pair of lesbians. You can quite literally say lipstick lesbians. And that she herself was bisexual. And she’s certainly interested in this kind of subject matter. Round about 10 years ago, I wrote a book about Tamara de Lempicka, and I was invited to go to Saudi Arabia to give a lecture on her. And I was thinking, “Oh my goodness, I don’t know how I had the chutzpah to do it.” Really crazy thing. But I was thinking, you know, that nudity is such a problem, you know, in Saudi Arabia.

So anyway, I did a whole series of lectures actually. And every night, my hostess, who’s a very nice Lebanese woman, I would go through all the images and say, “Can I show this? Or will I be in trouble if I show this?” And I was expecting her to say, “Well, you can’t possibly show this picture.” But she said, “No, no, absolutely fine. They didn’t have a problem with that.” I’ll show you later a picture that they did have a problem with. So yeah, here’s the detail, the background with a Picasso on the right-hand side. So these angular jagged planes, she’s borrowed that from cubism. But using it really as a backdrop. And the theme of lesbian love had been a very popular one with French in French Avant-Garde circles, going right back to the middle of the 19th century. This is a painting that she could have seen because it was in a public collection. It’s in the collection of the city of Paris at the Petit Palais, it’s by Courbet, it’s called Le Sommeil, sleep, shows two women sleeping together. And the other artist who she is very, very keen on, has a very big influence on her, and I’ll tell you more about that is Ingres. And this is a detail of Ingres’ Turkish Bath, which she could have seen at the Louvre. And she said she wants to be modern, but she’s also an artist who pays a lot of attention to the art of the past and to tradition of western art. And she’s looking back to the Renaissance. And an artist I think she particularly likes and borrows a lot from is Agnolo Bronzino, who’s caught artist in Florence in the 16th century.

Who with these glassy smooth surfaces, porcelain treatment of flesh and very sharp contours. That’s Bronzino on the right-hand side and Tamara on the left, and again, Bronzino Bronzino’s most famous painting, the Allegory of Love that’s in the National Gallery, there been many things about this picture I think that would’ve fascinated her. First of all, the sexual ambiguity, its like perversity of Venus offering an open mouth kiss to her son Cupid, who’s fondling one of her her nipples. And the other very typical feature of mannerist art is the figura serpentina, the serpentine line of the twisting pose of the body. Which you find a lot of in Renaissance mannerist art. And it’s something that she borrows and makes frequent use of as you can see on the left. But she’s also, I think, interested in the emotionalism of the Baroque. We’ve got paintings here. Well, you’ve got a photograph of her in a very Baroque pose with the raised eyeball. The two old master paintings here are by Guido Reni, who Anita Brookner described memorably as the master of the raised eyeball. And then a painting by Tamara at the bottom there. And so this young woman is suffering from what the French would call ennui, which is more than boredom. It’s a sort of lethargy, element of melancholy even of depression. And this is a cue for my next song, which is by the chanteuse Damia, who is all who’s dubbed the “La tragédienne de la chanson”, because she tended to sing real wrist-slitting depressing songs. And the title of this song is, “Moi…je m'ennuie,” I’m bored. But as I said, it’s a bit more than bored.

♪ Music plays ♪

And here she’s rather out outrageously, of course parroting The Ecstasy of St. Teresa of Bernini, which you see on the left-hand side and Tamara on the right hand side. But overall, I think Ingres is the great influence on her work. And she would’ve been very familiar with this painting of Madam Riviere. Now, Ingres was… One of his first important portrait commissions, was three portraits of the Riviere family. Monsieur Riviere, Madam Riviere, and Mademoiselle Riviere. And I think when Tamara was commissioned in the late 1920s, to paint three portraits of the Bouchard family. Dr. Bouchard, his wife Madam, and their daughter, Mademoiselle, she inevitably will have thought of Ingres as a model. These three paintings by Ingres which were in the Louvre. So you can see obviously the pose is almost a direct quotation. Madam Bouchard of Madam Riviere with the positioning of the hands and the curving twist of the body.

So Ingres, this is again an update to Ingres on left-hand side, Roger and Angelica. And as rather kinky painting of Andromeda on the right-hand side by Tamara, again with the hands in chains and the rather goiterous neck and the passivity that she’s given her Andromeda a modern twist. Well, twist is the right word for this really, isn’t it? With the hairstyle, very modern hairstyle and the lipstick. The classicism is in the air in the 1920s. And two major figures have a big influence here. Picasso, who had a neoclassical phase in the early 1920s, but in a way gave permission for Avant-Garde artists to go back to classical themes and classical stars. And another very important figure for Interwar Classicism was Aristide Maillol. Here he is later in life with a sculpture inspired by the great love at the end of his life, Dina Vierny, who is a young Yugoslavian, I think she’s Croatian Jewish girl who he managed to… She was actually arrested by the Nazis. He managed to save her and she later set up the Mailloli Museum in Paris. And incidentally, anybody going to Paris in the next month or so, there is a wonderful show devoted to Maillol at the Musée d'Orsay. So this kind of classicism is very pervasive. And you find this, it was adopted in fascist countries.

This is an Italian painting of the fascist period. On the top left, and a Nazi painting. This is a painting that actually belonged to Hitler, bottom in the middle. And Tamara on the right side, this is her ad an Adam and Eve. And so this is the painting I had to take out of my Saudi Arabian talk. Because it showed… They were quite fine to have as many female nudes as I liked. But that combining a male nude and a female nude was absolutely not on in Saudi Arabia. And there’s an interesting story behind this painting. She’d started work on it and she needed a male model. And one day she was returning to her studio in her little Deux Cheveux Citroen car, and she must have committed some traffic offence. And a drop-dead gorgeous hunky policeman stopped her to give her a ticket and she looked him up and down and she said, “How would you like to come back to my studio and take your clothes off?” And of course he obviously thought this was an offer too good to refuse. And he went back to her studio. I mean, we don’t know exactly what they did, but I can guess. But she describes how he very carefully undressed himself and laid his revolver on top of his neatly folded uniform before posing for this picture. So this is also a period of neorealism in the 1920s. And again, this is an international style. You find variance of it in different countries.

On the right-hand side is an English painting by an artist called Meredith Frampton, that has a similar kind of rather glacial sculptural perfection as Tamara. But is completely lacking… I mean, she’s a very unsexy lady, isn’t she? She’s a nice young English upper class girl on the right-hand side who completely lacks the sort of sexiness and the lure and the Parisian naughtiness of Tamara’s painting on the left-hand side. But Tamara, although her paintings would be quite kinky, I’m going to show you quite a few that have rather strange undertones, sexual undertones, but never the sort of slightly grotesque perversity that you find in the Berlin paintings of the same period. Once again, anybody coming to Paris over the summer, the fantastic show has just opened at the Pompidou of Germany in the Weimar period. Both these paintings incidentally, the portrait of Sylvia Van Harden on the left-hand side and the portrait of a French aristocrat on the right-hand side. Both these paintings are in that show at the Pompidou at the moment.

Now the great period of Tamara is quite short. And then a number of artists like this, I would say artists maybe of the second rank. And much though I like her, I think that she does belong to the second rank of artists who can do masterpieces and be wonderful when they’re going with the general cultural flow. But when that current changes and they find themselves swimming against the current, they find it very difficult to maintain their inspiration. I think this was the case with her. All her best work is done between 1925 and 1932. 1925 was the exposition des arts créatifs that gave its name to the Art Deco style. Here you see a poster for it and the entrances to it. Actually, she did not take part in its exhibition ‘cause she was having an exhibition, a one-woman exhibition in the summer of 1925 in Milan. But it is really- And that was the first thing that started to make her reputation. Here is a painting by an artist called Jean Dupas, that was in the exposition of des arts créatifs. It was in the famous Hotel du Collectionneur, which combined the glass of Nalique, the furniture of Ruman. And you can see how it looked in that pavilion on the right-hand side. And I think it’s in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs now this painting. But you can see obvious similarities with Tamara, the rather, the glassy smoothness, the sculptural treatment of the bodies, this sort of porcelain marmorial look of the flesh.

So she’s very in tune with high fashion in the late 1920s, early 1930s. This is the golden age of fashion illustration, golden age of Vogue, wonderful Vogue cover here by George Lepape on the left-hand side, which makes an interesting comparison with Tamara’s portrait of Suzy Solidor that I’m going to talk about in more detail later. These two self-portraits by Tamara were actually both commissioned by a German fashion magazine called Die Dame. So they were commissioned as covers. She’s given herself dark hair on the right-hand side. And she was of course blonde, as you’ve seen in the photographs. And she’s sewing her- This is the new woman of the 1920s. The First World War has happened. They’ve jettison their corset. They’re more active. It’s very fashionable for women in the 1920s if you’re really smart, actually to go to the gym and to take part in sports. And you see that also in the fashion magazines of the period who’ve got two very independent sports. And women drivers. And still in the 1920s, it would’ve been a tiny, tiny percentage of women who would’ve owned and driven a car, but it was a very cool thing to do. So here we’ve got this very metallic look, and it’s rather strange. You’ve got a, in a way, you’ve got this very, very agitated drapery that is almost Baroque. You know how in Baroque Art, I think I’ve got one here, yes, it’s a Baroque painting. The drapery, the curtain in the background, this palette’s clothing. It really has… It’s agitated, it has a life of its own.

But in Tamara’s work, it seems to have been transmuted into metal. And typically this very demure young lady in a way, she’s demure, she’s got, you know, her white gloves and she’s got these very elegant hand gestures. But the drapery is also quite suggestive and quite sexy the way that, you know, her nipples and her navel are really emphasised by the dress that she’s wearing. And hands. Hands are always tricky for any artists. And you’ll find even the greatest artists will normally have a formula for dealing the problem of drawing hands. Dura, Van Dyke, Sergeant, they all have their particular way of doing hands. And I would say actually Tamara’s pretty good at hands. But of course they’re rather mannered and effective poses of her hands. And you can see her actually adopting these kind of mannered poses to show off the hands in this photograph of her on the right-hand side. And that’s a detail of one of her paintings on the left. And two more details of portraits showing the hands. And of course, well, you’ve seen how lipstick, this is something that’s quite new really after the First World War. And women had tinted their lips in the 19th century. But even respectable women, bourgeois women, to have this really painted lips, this was a new thing after the First World War. And also, of course, the fingernails.

This is a still from a movie which I recommend very, very strongly too, if you haven’t seen it already. It’s called The Women directed by George George Cukor. It was a big MGM blockbuster that came out in 1939. And it starred an entirely female cast of over a hundred women. Every star on the MGM lot, apart from Greta Garbo, she wasn’t in it but everybody else, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Rosalyn Russell, everybody, Paulette Goddard, they’re all in this movie. It’s a fun movie. It’s actually, I would say, even though it is based on a play by a woman author, I think it’s quite misogynistic in its approach to women. That women are basically very bitchy with one another. And the nail varnish plays a major role in the plot of this movie that all the women go to a beauty parlour and the woman who does the nail varnish is a terrible gossip. And so, well, anyway, I’ll leave you to watch the film to discover how this transpires in the film. But in the film, the predatory women adopt a nail varnish, which is called Jungle Red. And this is Norma Shearer, who’s the long-suffering sweet noble wife until she realises that she’s got to get her fingernails painted with Jungle Red and she has to fight Joan Crawford to get her husband back in a tooth and claw and Jungle Red fingernails.

So it was inevitable, I suppose, that Tamara would get to New York. But she in a way left it a bit late. She got there in 1929, she had a fantastic reception, very successful exhibition, she got lots of commissions. This is a Mrs. Bush, I don’t know if she’s related to the Texas Bushes, but it’s a painting of, at 1929 done in New York. Notice like everybody I suppose, who went to New York, she was thrilled by the skyline of New York. I’m thrilled when I go to New York, I always have this sense of, you know, I react to New York where the Romantics reacted to the Alps. I have a sense of sublime at the incredible scale, the grandeur of the skyline. Total thrill for me, when you are driving in from the airport and you go through Queens and you see this amazing skyline of skyscrapers. So I still feel that, but you can imagine how exciting that was in the 1920s. This is, as you can see, a Vogue cover on the left-hand side. And so from now on, even when she goes back to Europe, she often adopts a sort of Manhattan backdrop to her portraits. This is Mrs. Allen bought.

And of course another female artist who celebrates skyscrapers is Georgia O'Keeffe. And there are quite interesting parallels between the two artists, Tamara and Georgia. I think you could actually do a rather interesting joint exhibition of the two. And also flowers, the way in both of them that flowers are sexualized, particularly lilies. And there is clearly some kind of metaphor for female sex in the shape of the lilies. Tamara on the left-hand side, and Georgia O'Keeffe on the right-hand side. So this is Miss Mademoiselle Bouchard. She is the daughter of the doctor. Her father became immensely rich because he invented and he patented a remedy for diarrhoea called Lactaid. As you can- In the background here, we’re in the south of France, of course the background here rather than New York, these chunky buildings, Mediterranean buildings. And you can see the yacht, which bizarrely actually was his yacht was named Lactaid, not really terribly glamorous, I would say to have a yacht named after a remedy for stomach problems. But there you are.

So she’s a teenager, but she’s a very sexy teenager. My theory, I believe probably that Tamara, who was pretty voracious in her sexual appetites, got through the whole family; daddy, mommy and certainly had something going with the daughter. This is the mother, here is the father, the very handsome, very debonair Dr. Bouchard. And I’ve chosen another song to go with this from the period, it’s Noel Coward and it’s sung by Gertrude Lawrence. And it’s the patient swooning over her handsome doctor.

♪ Once I loved such a shattering physician ♪ ♪ Quite the best looking doctor in the state ♪ ♪ He looked after my physical condition ♪ ♪ And his bedside manner was great ♪ ♪ When I’d gaze up and see him there above me ♪ ♪ Looking less like a doctor than a Turk ♪ ♪ I was tempted to whisper, “Do you love me ♪ ♪ Or do you merely love your work?” ♪ ♪ He said my bronchial tubes were entrancing ♪ ♪ My epiglottis filled him with glee ♪ ♪ He simply loved my larynx ♪ ♪ And went wild about my pharynx ♪ ♪ But he never said he loved me ♪ ♪ He said my epidermis was darling ♪ ♪ And found my blood as blue as can be ♪ ♪ He went through wild ecstatics ♪ ♪ When I showed him my lymphatics ♪ ♪ But he never said he loved me ♪

• In a comparison with Meredith Frampton style, this glassy smooth style, but I’m afraid this- I don’t think any young- I don’t think Gertrude Lawrence would’ve swooned over the doctor on the right-hand side. But yes, as I said, I’m pretty certain she had something going with the daughter. And the clue is this painting of a still life where you have a glass vase with these highly eroticized lilies. And on the glass table everything glass was very fashionable material, 'cause it’s hygienic and sleuth and shiny and transparent. And on the glass table you’ve got a pinup photograph of Paulette Bouchard looking a couple of years older I think, than she does in the portrait on the right. And this is to show that it’s sort of in the air. Here are two paintings by Diego Rivera. This is Natasha Gelman. They were very wealthy Jewish refugees who went to Mexico and built up a big art collection, the Gelmans. And once again, I think there is definitely a sexual suggestion in the way she’s posed in front of these lilies. The telephone. God, I hate telephones. If you knew how much I absolutely hate my mobile phone. But for me, it’s just an instrument of torture. And I hate the way that phones have taken over our lives even more since the pandemic.

But so telephones go back to the 19th century. And I think there are probably some people amongst you, 'cause I remember it from my childhood, who are old enough to remember party lines. And the incredible frustration of trying to get through to somebody when you get through the wrong person or somebody comes into the middle of your conversation. In 1930, Jean Cocteau wrote a play called “La Voix Humaine” and it’s a monologue for a woman on a phone. And she’s talking to her lover, her ex-lover who’s just dumped her to marry somebody else. And she keeps on getting interrupted and she just gets more and more fraught and more hysterical. It’s about, I suppose about a 40-minute monologue of rising hysteria. This was a great success. It was put on at the Comédie-Française in 1930 with the actress Berthe Bovy, who you see on the right-hand side. And the same year Tamara painted this picture. And it’s too much of a coincidence. I’m pretty sure that this painting on the left must have been inspired by the cocktail pen. Look at her facial expression. She’s talking to a lover, isn’t she? I’m sure she is from the expression on her face. Well, here is an excerpt from the play with the original actress, Berthe Bovy.

[Clip plays]

So a lot of her paintings of women are not strictly portraits. They’re not conventional portraits. They’re pictures that have an anecdotal element and they often have a very titillating sexual element, which somehow seems strange in a woman painting. You more expect it from a male artist. And I could- If you want to criticise that, you can say, “Yes, there is something a bit icky about some of these pictures. Something a bit false and insincere.” I mean, the painting of a mother breastfeeding her baby, that is definitely turned into a sexy image. It’s sexualized. And the painting on the left-hand side is called The Convalescence. So this is supposed to be a woman who’s recovering from some kind of illness that she’s maybe recovering, but she’s certainly not covering up very much. And this, it reminds me of another artist of the past who was a great master of this kind of slightly slighted elation. And this is Grosz, he’s an 18th century artist. And this is meant to be a painting of a grieving widow. And it, you can see in her grief, of course, she’s rent her clothes and she’s exposing a rather gorgeous nipple as she weeps in front of a bust of her dead husband and reads his love letters to her. Another side of Tamara, which I think is definitely questionable, is her depiction of children. And again, I find her approach to painting children strange in a woman.

If she were a man, I think you would really question these pictures. And think that there was a kind of slightly paedophile element. Where you drop down to their level, you are looking up at them, the emphasis on their legs and a certain sexist- These are paintings of her own daughter, Kizette. She didn’t have a maternal bone in her body. She was actually a terrible mother. Poor Kizette, really had a really hard time with her growing up and as an adult. This is Balthus, an artist who one doesn’t hear very much about. I think with the awareness maybe hyperawareness that we all have now of paedophilia, that Balthus’ paintings are… I’m not sure if you could really even have an exhibition of them.

This is Balthus’ on the left-hand side. And this is Tamara’s painting of her daughter giving the viewer a very calm expression and exposing her legs. And this surely is her ickiest painting. This is her daughter Kizette at the time of her first communion. I think more in tune with contemporary feeling and thinking is the gender bending element in her work that she paints a lot of very beautiful… This is a type from the 1920s, isn’t it? And if you think of, you know, movies of the period, Raymond Navarro and Rudolph Valentino, these men with their slicked hair and their narrow waist, and they’re rather effeminate allure. And here’s a song to go with this painting. This is the song, Whose too beautiful to be nice.

♪ Music plays ♪

Oh, too pretty to be nice. And his love is completely fake and false. Two more of these rather gigolo-like, beautiful young man. And this amazing-looking man. He was a Italian aristocrat. Again with his slicked back hair and his smooth good looks. Reminds me very much of- This is of course the- As I said, many of the male stars of the period had this kind of exquisite feminine beauty, particularly Tino Rossi, who was one of the biggest stars in France. And so I sort of think if this Italian aristocrat could sing, he’d certainly sound like Tino Rossi. And here he is.

♪ Music plays ♪

Could you resist him? I’m sure you’d be a puddle on the floor. This is actually… She did paint some rather more serious and substantial men. This is her brother-in-law who is an architect who worked with Robert Mallet Stevens. And you can see one of his buildings in the background. And there is a building by Robert Mallet Stevens, a studio built for the Martell brothers sculptors. Ah, this is her husband, Tadeusz. Well, you have to have a certain sympathy with him because as she was out there with her little car, she was driving down to the Bois de Boulogne to pick up men and women. She was very promiscuous, but she didn’t like it when he traded her in for a younger number. He took a younger mistress and she was angry about this. And she was actually working on this portrait when it happened. And she decided that she would exhibit the portrait with his right hand… Was it his left hand? Yes, he’s facing us, it’d be his left hand, I suppose, unfinished. And she exhibited the port- She got her revenge on him by exhibiting the portrait with a title “Portrait d'homme inachevé”, which has a double meaning.

Either it’s an unfinished portrait of a man, or it’s a portrait of an unfinished and inadequate man. But she certainly didn’t let the grass grant her feet. And she moved on and she had an affair with this woman, Suzy Solidor. Suzy Solidor was… Paris was in many ways incredibly tolerant compared with America or compared with Britain, especially towards same sex relationships, and especially towards women. So there was a very open lesbian culture in Paris in the interwar period with lesbian restaurants and clubs. One was actually run by this woman, Suzy Solidor. She was launch- She started off her career in society as the lover of a very aristocratic female antique dealer who introduced her into all the right circles and helped her launch her career as a chanteuse. But she was also an artist model. And she was probably painted by more artists than any woman in history. Is reckoned there were over 600 paintings of her. And if you find yourself on the Cote d'Azur in the town of au Cagnes, on just up instream from the coast, there’s a Grimaldi castle that’s a museum. And they have 40 portraits of Suzy Solidor, including this one, which is probably the most famous one by Tamara.

And so there is a Suzy Solidor fashionably draped on the right-hand side in cellophane. Cellophane was a newly invented material and dead sexy in the 1930s. There’s even a line devoted to it in your Garbo salary, your the National Gallery, your cellophane. But, so I now want to play you the voice of Suzy Solidor. It’s a very extraordinary sound. Jean Cocteau said, “Oh, this voice, it comes from down there, it comes from sex.” And she recorded her most famous song is called “Ouvre”. I’m not sure I’ll get through it to the naughtiest part of the song. It’s a song which you couldn’t have imagined anybody singing in public in America or in England in the period. Ouvre, it starts off open your windows in the morning and then it moves in Open your blouse, that I can touch your breasts. And then it moves down the body and it ends up with Open your trembling thighs to me.

♪ Music plays ♪

I’m going to finish there, finish on the low note you could say, ‘cause I’ve run out of time and I’m going to see what comments and questions.

Q&A and Comments

Oh, Ina, thank you. Well, you’re all my family too, I must say. And I really like it when people turn up in Paris and introduce themselves. Explain comparison to Fitzgerald in terms of content, art, writing. It’s what I said. That they give you a picture of a period and a particular class. Of course it’s a very, you know, people… As soon as you say Scott Fitzgerald, you have an idea of a period and a particular culture. And I think Tamara gives a similar kind of picture of a very similar class.

Q: Did Piaf differ from the hedonistic model of the time? A: No, she didn’t. In fact, she was- You know, if I continue with this lecture, she would’ve come into it because I mean, Piaf of course lived occasionally in Brussels. She was also bisexual. And there was a very scandalous lesbian movie called La Garcon. And Piaf has a cameo role in that movie. And again, that’s something you could catch on YouTube. You’ve checked her, it says she was born 16th of May in 1898. Well, yes, I dunno really. So if we really know for sure about her, but it sounds from that key entry sounds quite definite.

• Patrick?

• Yes?

• [Wendy] Would you like to continue with this lecture? Is there another lecture?

• You mean on another? I could maybe in August. I could continue with that 'cause, yeah, I could, there’s enough material, there’s plenty more material there. But anyway, I’ll just go through. Funbook Flappers, Six Women of a Dangerous Generation. Sounds good, includes Tamara.

Q: Do you think they have a photographic quality? A: They’re also very abstracted, aren’t they? I mean, they’re only photographic in the sense that they’re smooth. I would say they’re very stylized, which I’m not sure I agree with you about that.

The Ennuie singer was Damia. Wonderful, wonderful singer and that’s D-A-M-I-A, who was a great model for Piaf. Damia always dressed in a little black dress, just Piaf really modelled her whole persona on Damia. She’s a very prolific singer on record. I really recommend her records to you. I could give a talk on my all if people would like when I’ll discuss that with Trudy. I’ve been to the show in Paris and absolutely loved it. She was, Betty. Yes, you’re quite right. She was involved in a big scandal on Lake Garda with the Italian poet, Gabriele D'Annunzio. And he recorded- We know about that scandal from both sides, from her memories and from his memories, and it’s pretty lured stuff. Thank you. And thank you for nice compliments, Georgio Keith, railed against critics who- Didn’t get the rest of that. That’s true, who thought her far too sexual, but you know, I think she protests too much. They are sexual, what can you say?

Why a man was turned into a most impressive short- You are right by Poulanc. It’s this… The original singer made a wonderful recording of it. Can’t remember her name for the moment, Magda Oliver. There are several live forms of, in French and the Italian, it’s a fantastic piece. But Tamara she was ostentatiously Catholic. I think she was Jewish, I think it’s on her father’s side. So she wouldn’t have been recognised as a Jew by Jews. And my feeling that the Catholic, especially in the thirties after 33, she really went over the top with, you know, pretending to be very Catholic. And it may have been some kind, who knows, some kind of fear or some kind of defence mechanism. So Nanette really just- People, you know, as I said, she’s a marmite painter. Some people adore her work and some people really detest it and find it very creepy. Ingrid Bergman. Did she? That’s interesting. I didn’t know she’d done that. Eyes heavy lidded cold moody, but challenging. Not a lot of- I don’t think she was a warm or happy person. I really don’t think she was. Thanks for nice comments. Oh my old student and friend, Chris. That’s lovely.

Q: Was Colette around? A: Yes, she was definitely around. Course, she’s an older generation. And she also belongs to very much a lesbian set, but they were of the generation before.

Yeah. Well, I better not say what I think of, you know, Waldemar Januszczak is not my favourite critic. A list of the songs. Yes. I think this- I listed the songs. You will have been sent back on, you know, there’s a list that comes with every lecture. And if you click into that and you scroll down, you’ll find a list of the songs and of the singers. And at some point, actually I’d really love to do a whole lecture on those French female singers of the 1920s and thirties. The songs are so extraordinary, so different from anything that we would have in the English-speaking world.

So that’s it. Thank you all very much. And onto Chagall on Sunday.