Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (50 page)

It incensed Tamara that Tadeusz should dare to accuse her of selfishness. She was beginning to receive important commissions and her paintings were starting to sell. She saw herself as the saviour of the Lempicki family, raising them out of their humiliating dependency on her relatives. Beyond the good she had done her husband and daughter, she also regarded herself as an important painter – and as such above reproach.

Kizette had long learned to accept Tamara’s mantra. Her mother, her Cherie, ‘was an artist always, before anything else.’ She had accepted that most of the time she would be cared for by her grandmother Malvina, while Tamara was walled inside the ferocious concentration of her painting. She learned to treasure the occasional days when Cherie left her easel and announced that they would take a walk in the Bois de Boulogne, a trip to the open-air skating rink at the Palais de Glace or even a rare holiday. But when Tamara was on vacation, Kizette still accepted that her mother never stopped thinking about her work.

During one trip to Italy, Tamara, Kizette and Malvina were eating lunch in a restaurant in Rome when Tamara suddenly halted the conversation. She was struck by the quality of the sunlight as it slanted through the window and onto their checked tablecloth. Needing to see its effect more clearly she swept aside their plates of food, sending antipasti flying, and snapped imperiously to the startled diner opposite to get out of her line of vision: ‘There is an unforgettable light coming through the window opposite. Please move, monsieur, so that I can study [it].’
²

Tamara’s addiction to her work was genuine. She sought to capture the perfect image no less intently than Zelda sought to master the perfect jump or the perfect balance in the ballet studio. But she also wanted to be judged by the same standards as a man. Picasso and the other male painters in Paris all took mistresses and lived as they chose – their behaviour justified in the name of art. Tamara believed it was her right, even her duty, to claim the same freedom.

The further she progressed with her career, the more conscious she became of the battle to hold her professional ground. Unlike Marie Laurencin, who’d had the support of her lover Apollinaire, or Emilie Charmy with Matisse as a mentor, she lacked powerful male allies. Nor could she claim membership of a politically influential group, such as the surrealists. As a painter of portraits she earned good money, and she was acknowledged to have a perceptively original eye. In her 1923 portrait of André Gide, Tamara stylized the writer’s features into an almost tribal mask of intelligence, his eyes two black glittering slits in the carved planes of his face. In the 1927 portrait of her friend the exiled Grand Duke Gabriel Constantinovich, she caught a combination of nobility and dissolution that was both arrestingly personal yet profoundly evocative of the Grand Duke’s class. But however impressive Tamara’s achievements, there were those in the art world who regarded commercial portraiture as a hangover from the past, almost irrelevant to the great modernist enterprise of European painting. As a genre it earned her little status.

There was one movement to which Tamara would later become very profitably affiliated – art deco or art moderne
*
– but in 1925 deco was regarded principally as a movement within commercial design. Its name was taken from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, which had opened in Paris in April that year. Its exhibits ranged from furniture and kitchen equipment to clothes and architectural design, and it proffered the vision of a shiny, confident lifestyle, tailor-made to the post-war era. Products came in bold colours and efficient, geometric forms, they radiated a cosmopolitan assurance in their fusion of cultural and historic references – a radio shaped like an Aztec pyramid, a bourgeois dinner service patterned with an African tribal motif. Few of the visitors who crowded into the exhibition could afford to build a deco villa like the Murphys and live the full deco lifestyle, but most had the money to buy themselves a small piece of it – a chrome coffee pot, a scallop-edged powder compact, or a bevelled bottle of perfume.

The connections between Tamara’s painting and the deco aesthetic would later become very obvious: in 1978 she would even claim that she had been a prime mover in deco, dating it from her own 1925 painting,
Irene and her Sister,
and referring to it as the greatest of her achievements. But at the time it was of little use as a platform for her work, and in order to push her career forward she was casting round for some kind of external sponsorship and support. The salons where she had already been exhibited – the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants – had shown her work to a large public. But within the Parisian art world, power had begun to shift to the smaller independent galleries, and by 1925 Tamara needed to find one that would nurture her own career.

Her instinct was to look beyond the crowded marketplace of Paris. On the way home from her Italian holiday with Kizette and Malvina, she broke her journey in Milan to visit the wealthy collector Count Emanuele Castelbarco. Later she would spin this meeting as a spur-of-the-moment encounter between a nervous young artist and a formidable grandee, but in fact she had prepared for it very carefully, taking a portfolio of photographs to show him her pictures and formulating a determined line in negotiation. She came away triumphant, with the Count offering her a two-week solo show at his Milan gallery, Bottega di Poesia.

It was due to open at the end of November, in just four months’ time, and Tamara returned to Paris flooded with adrenalin. She bullied her friends and family into sitting for her, experimented with painting still lives, and by the time she travelled back to Italy she had over fifty works ready. Meanwhile the Count had commandeered the Italian art press as well as all his friends to welcome her. Tamara hadn’t felt so happily the centre of attention since the day she had floated up the aisle in her wedding dress in St Petersburg. In Milan, everybody seemed to notice and admire her. The foreword to her exhibition catalogue, written by the French critic Jacques Reboud, made flattering allusions to her ‘genius’ for form, her role as an ‘evangelist’ for cubism. The Italian critics were equally enthused, and no less encouraging to Tamara was the hospitality she received from Castelbarco’s rich and cultured circle of friends.

They were mostly cosmopolitan and aristocratic, the kind of people with whom she felt instantly at ease. In Paris, there were so many networks for her to navigate – the writers and the painters, the Left Bank and the Right Bank, the socialists and the surrealists – and she had worked hard to gain a foothold in most of them. She had got herself introduced to Left Bank figures like Hemingway and Lucia Joyce at the chaotic parties thrown by Jules Pascin (the famously eccentric artist who painted in a matador suit and dined in a dressing gown and bowler hat). At Nathalie Barney’s salon she had become acquainted with Casarti, de Acosta and the writer Colette. She was on nodding terms with Janet Flanner, Nancy Cunard, Zelda Fitzgerald and Sara Murphy. She was close to Jean Cocteau, who knew everybody; she called Coco Chanel and Jean Patou her friends; she boasted of sharing cocaine with André Gide. But she had few intimates among these people, especially the American and British expatriates, in whose language she was not yet confidently fluent.

In Milan, however, she was introduced to men and women very much like herself: privileged by birth, instinctively right wing in their politics, but also very hedonistic in their tastes. Among her new best friends was the Marquis Guido Sommi Picenardi, an exquisite young man who knew everyone in Europe, from the Polignac family to Alice Keppel and her daughter Violet Trefusis (one notoriously the mistress of Edward VII, the other notoriously the lover of Vita Sackville-West). Picenardi became an important patron of Tamara’s work, and possibly even her lover. ‘I refused myself nothing,’ she later boasted, ‘I had always had
innamorato,
always. For my inspiration, I liked to go out in the evenings and have a good-looking man tell me how beautiful I am or how great an artist I am – and he touches my hand … I loved it! I needed it.’
³

Tamara lingered in Milan for several weeks, working her new contacts and enjoying her new lovers. She only just kept her promise to Kizette to return home for Christmas, and she was so keyed up by her achievements that she barely paused for family festivities before getting back to her career. The November 1925 issue of
Harper’s Bazaar
had featured an entire page of photographs of her and Kizette ‘playing hoop’ in the Bois de Boulogne. Tamara claimed these shots had been a happy accident and that a passing photographer had asked them to pose. But the photographs have a staged look, which suggests that it was Tamara herself who orchestrated it. Both mother and daughter are immaculately dressed, Tamara in a striped wool coat with luxuriously deep velvet cuffs, Kizette in bright white gloves and socks and a checked coat. Tamara’s hand is lightly placed on the hoop circling Kizette’s waist, balancing it so that it can be clearly seen, and both of them are smiling happily at the camera, as though nothing could be so natural or normal as the two of them playing together all day.

At that moment, however, Kizette was seeing very little of her mother. On her return Tamara had successfully used her Milan debut to secure an exhibition at a Parisian gallery run by the serious but commercially successful dealer Colette Weil. Once again the pressure was on her to produce new work, and once again she was working long days to produce it. She had become obsessed with nudes, relishing the challenge of their formal composition, of capturing light on skin, but also taking an almost narcissistic pleasure in the beauty of the female form.

One of her most seminal recent works had been
The Model
(1925), and in it Tamara had begun to explore the expressive impact of physical distortion. A single standing woman takes up almost the whole canvas; the lifted arm with which she shields her face from the viewer has a massive heft, and her left leg has a correspondingly voluptuous thrust. In formal terms these exaggerated elements combine to create an S-shaped rhythm through the picture. But more significantly they lend it a concentrated physical inwardness, making the woman appear fully absorbed in the drama of her own body.

In
Group of Four Nudes
(1926), Tamara went further in the balance between form and sexuality. The surface of the picture is theatrically glossy, the four women’s faces lustrously made up, their skins luminously perfect. Yet the intimate clustering of their bodies implies an inward compulsion, a secret life. Along with
Le Rythme,
which Tamara painted as a companion piece,
Four Nudes
received some of the finest reviews of her career so far, with critics acclaiming her twin debt to Ingres and cubism.

Another, more elemental aspect of Tamara’s fascination with nudes was the thrill she derived from seeking out new models. Her hunting ground was Paris, the bars, theatres, parks and streets, and while some of the strangers she approached had the look of professionals – artists’ models or prostitutes – others were riskier propositions. Late in 1931, when she was working on her painting
Adam and Eve,
she spotted a policeman on duty who seemed to be her quintessential Adam, and she regarded it as a professional coup when the young man agreed to pose, coming to her studio when he was off duty and showing no embarrassment whatsoever as he ‘took off his things, and folded them neatly on the chair, placing his big revolver on the top’.
⁴
He was, he claimed, an artist too.

Another prized find was the stylish woman she noticed in the audience at the Théâtre de Paris. Tamara had been struck by the elegance of her profile and the slope of her naked shoulders in evening dress: she seemed an ideal fit for the fifth and final figure in the painting she was working on, which was probably
Le Rythme.
Expecting rejection, she nonetheless touched the stranger on the shoulder and asked if she would model for her. To her surprise, the woman looked at her ‘with level eyes’ and agreed. Over the next three weeks she sat for Tamara wearing nothing but a transparent green mousseline shift. Tamara recalled her as one of her favourite models – ‘Perfection of body, beautiful colour of skin, light and gold’.
⁵
In her gratitude she’d tried to offer gifts of flowers, chocolates, even money but the woman had declined. ‘Thank you, no … I knew and admired your paintings’ she’d said, before taking her final leave. ‘She was gone. I never knew who she was.’
⁶

Tamara may well have embellished this story – the number of rich, respectable women in Paris who would be prepared to model nude was limited, and she would probably have known or recognized most of them. But the fantasy was revealing. She liked to think of herself as an undercover agent, seeking out people as audacious and exceptional as herself, as a woman operating on the ‘fringes of society’, equally at home in a palace or the gutter, but always at a remove from everything ‘bourgeois, mediocre or just
nice.
’
⁷

Tamara’s sense of herself as a solitary hunter was one reason why she now visited rue Jacob less frequently. She found Nathalie Barney’s salons too whimsical, too safe; now that she had money to spend (her paintings were selling for an average of fifty thousand francs each) she began to host her own private parties in her own more outrageous style. It was difficult to be shocking in mid-1920s Paris, a city inured to most forms of outrage. Zelda and Scott found their own antics had less impact this side of the Atlantic; when they jumped into the pool at the Lido cabaret they elicited little more than an elegant, collective shrug from the Parisians present. Hardly more successful was Caressa Crosby, wife of the American aesthete Harry Crosby, who once hired a baby elephant to transport her to an artists’ ball, which she attended as an Inca princess, her naked breasts barely concealed by her long blue wig.