How did Tamara Lempicka (1894-1980) make a break with traditional mores and gender conventions in her art and in the fairy tale-like life she composed? What role did the intertwining of the sacred and the erotic play in this? On the occasion of the opening of the artist's monographic exhibition at the Baker Museum in Naples, we invite you to learn more about her work.

Tamara Lempicka's fairy tale

In the biography composed by the painter Tamara Lempicka (née Hurwitz) in the shape of a painting, truth was repeatedly replaced by fiction. In spite of many years of research into her biography, thanks to which we now know that, contrary to her own declarations, she did not come from a wealthy Polish aristocratic family, but from a middle-class bourgeois milieu of Polish-Latvian Jews, and that she was born in 1894, not 1898. - The place of her birth has still not been clearly established. Perhaps the question of whether it was in Warsaw or Moscow will never receive a clear answer. Regardless of the resolution of this question, there is no doubt that her noble Polishness played an important role in the public image she built. The strategy of concealing her Jewish, bourgeois roots - possibly partly motivated by a desire to avoid discrimination, but also by a desire to make her history unusual, different and exotic - while at the same time displaying her membership of the Polish elite, is reminiscent of carnivalesque role reversals and fairy tale narratives. As in every fairy tale, in the story of Lempicka we also find a 'prince' in her shadow, whose role is played first, from 1916, by her first husband - the handsome lawyer Tadeusz Lempicki (1889-1950), and then, from 1934, by her second spouse - the baron, owner of a vast estate in Austria-Hungary, Raoul Kuffner de Dioszegh (1886-1961). The legend she created resembles a fairy tale also because it contains moments of reparation for the injustices suffered. After losing her possessions and emigrating from the Russian Empire to Paris in the aftermath of the October Revolution, Lempicka succeeds as a sexually liberated, non-heteronormative artist living outside traditional morality, and her trip overseas - undertaken in the face of growing socio-political tensions before the Second World War - also ends with a happy ending: she gains popularity among the aristocratic elite and Hollywood stars. In contrast, her last years spent in peace at her residence in Cuernavaca are crowned by a spectacular epilogue - in accordance with her wishes, her artist's ashes are scattered over the Popocatépetl volcano.

Lempicka's inter-war painting style: art deco

Tamara Lempicka entered the art scene in Paris immediately after the end of the Great War. Her art of the interwar period reflects the aesthetic and moral changes taking place at the time. We find echoes of her studies at the private schools of the nabist Maurice Denis (1870-1943) and the Cubist reaching back to the classical art repertoire of André Lhote (1885-1962). It was her experiences in their studios that shaped her mature artistic language - combining inspiration from the art of the old masters with modern form. An important point of reference for her formal explorations at the time was also the current of return to order, departing from the avant-garde solutions of the beginning of the century. Lempicka rose to prominence in the 1920s and 1930s primarily through portraits depicting representatives of the aristocracy, the clergy, but also marginalised figures painted in the style now known as art deco. These paintings were characterised by compact frames, strong chiaroscuro, precise drawing, compositional harmony and geometrised forms.

Sacred and erotic

Among the portraits, female nudes of a carnal, sensual nature were of particular interest and controversy - situating themselves, as art historian Marcin Lachowski put it, 'on the border between individual subjectivity and objectification'. A large proportion of these are compositions in which the artist has appropriated motifs taken from mythology and Christian sacred art, using them to push the boundaries of women's representation of gender and sexuality. By creating these openly depicting the pleasure and often non-heteronormative orientation of her models (usually also her female partners), Lempicka negotiated her own position as a woman artist at the same time. She was demonstrating her belonging to the profession of artist within the obligatory, male-determined canon of art, while at the same time undermining its rules by emphasising her own agency.

Lempicka composed erotic images of women, alluding to images of a sleeping Ariadne or a resting Venus, an echo of which can be found, for example, in the nude La Bella by Raphael (1927 ), now in a private collection abroad. The diagonal arrangement of the composition, to which the artist would later return twice, was composed in such a way as to direct the viewer's gaze towards the womb of the portrayed. In her paintings, the artist also readily drew on the iconography of the ecstasies of Christian mystics. This type of image inspired, among other things, an oil on panel in a private collection abroad entitled 'St Teresa of Avila', depicting a Spanish Carmelite of the Counter-Reformation period, which is a reference to the image of the 'Ecstasy of St Teresa' (1647-1652) by Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini. In depicting a mystic who, deprived of a creative role in the Church, managed to make her presence felt in it through her 'artistic' imagination, Lempicka emphasised the sensual dimension of female experience, still taboo in the interwar period. The heavenward gaze, familiar from images of religious ecstatic women, can also be found in the depiction of 'Madonna in a tond' (circa 1935) from the collection of the MUDO - Musée départemental de l'Oise in Beauvais, as well as in the oil painting 'First Communion' (1928), from the collection of the Musée d'Art et d'Industrie in Roubaix. In the latter, a miraculous dove hovers, about which Fernand Vallon wrote in 1930: "[...] a cunning envoy of Venus, an exquisite and diabolical imitation of the Holy Spirit, lifts the seam of her veil with her beak. She promises her mistress that after God's fleeting visitation of this little heart, ready to overflow at once, the beautiful mouth of a woman-child's love awaits her." Taken together, the images, inspired by images of the sacred, show how religion underpinned the ways in which the New Woman was depicted, co-shaped by Lempicka between the wars through her artistic practice.

Further reading:

P.J. Birnbaum, Tamara de Lempicka: The Modern Woman personified, Archives of Emigration. Studies - Sketches - Documents 2012, z. 1-2 (16-17), 116-126.

M. Lachowski, Tamara Łempicka in the circle of artistic inspirations, in Tamara Łempicka a Art Deco. Tradition and Modernity , ed. M. Kozieł, M. Lachowski, M. Muszkowska et al, exhibition catalogue, National Museum in Lublin, Villa la Fleur, Warsaw 2023, pp. 43-49.

G. Mori, Tamara de Lempicka. The Queen of the Modern , exhibition catalogue, Complesso del Vittoriano, Rome, Milan 2011.

K. Mieczkowska, Tamara Łempicka between facts and creation