took herself for tuition to two distinguished painters in succession: Maurice Denis (1870–1943) and André Lhote (1885–1962). De Lempicka later claimed that she did not gain much from Denis. It is indeed difficult to imagine that the intensely Catholic Denis would have been much in sympathy with the worldly, modish and erotic tendencies that soon began to display themselves in Tamara’s work. Nevertheless Denis was an intelligent initial choice as a teacher for the aspiring artist. For a brief period in the early 1890s Denis had been at the cutting edge of early modernism as a leading member of the Nabis group that included Vuillard, Bonnard, Serusier, Ranson and Vallotton.
Rhythm
1924
Oil on canvas, 160 × 144 cm
Private Collection
Inspired by the Synthetism of Gauguin’s Breton paintings, Denis and his friends broke with the naturalism of Salon painting and the very different naturalism of the Impressionists who were tied to sensory perception and painted small pictures in flat patches of bright, exaggerated colours. However the firm linearity and smooth modelling of the forms in Denis’ later works as well as his attempts to marry modernity with the classical tradition can hardly have failed to influence the young de Lempicka. The aesthetic expressed by Denis in his 1909 publication From Gauguin and Van Gogh to Classicism was surely one with which she would have agreed. “Art is not simply a visual sensation that we receive… a photograph however sophisticated of nature. No, it is a creation of the mind, for which nature is merely the springboard.” This is surely true of de Lempicka’s strangely cerebral and abstracted portraits of the 1920s.
Irene and Her Sister
1925
Oil on canvas, 146 × 89 cm
Irena Hochman Fine Art Ltd, New York
De Lempicka was far more ready to acknowledge the influence of her second teacher André Lhote. Whilst Denis must have seemed like a relic of the nineteenth century, Lhote, born in 1885, was not much more than a decade older than de Lempicka herself and was much closer to her modern and worldly outlook. Lhote had been associated with cubism since 1911 when he exhibited at the Salon des Independents and the Salon d’Automne alongside artists such as Jean Metzinger, Roger de La Fresnaye, Albert Gleizes and Fernand Leger. Rather than following the radical experiments in the dissolution of form in Picasso and Braque’s Analytical Cubism, he was attracted to the brightly coloured and more representational Synthetic Cubism of Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger.
Nude on a Terrace
1925
Oil on canvas, 37.8 × 54.5 cm
Private Collection
For Lhote, painting was a “plastic metaphor…pushed to the limit of resemblance”. In words not so different from those of Denis, he maintained that artists should aim to express an equivalence between emotion and visual sensation, rather than to copy nature. What made Lhote particularly useful to de Lempicka as an example and as a teacher was the acceptance of the decorative role of painting and also his attempt to fuse elements of cubist abstraction and disruption of conventional perspective with the figurative and classical tradition. If the artist de Lempicka did not spring to life fully formed and fully armed like Athena from the head of Zeus as she would have us believe, the gestation period of her mature art was remarkably short – lasting two or three years at most.
Seated Nude
c. 1925
Oil on canvas, 61 × 38 cm
Private Collection
Her Portrait of a Polo Player painted around 1922 already shows her predilection for the smart set but could otherwise have been painted by any competent artist trained in Paris in these years. It has a looseness of touch and a painterly quality that would soon disappear from her work. The modelling of the face in bold structural brush strokes shows an awareness of Cezanne that would undoubtedly have been encouraged by both Denis and Lhote. Similarly lush and painterly is the portrait of Ira Perrot later re-titled Portrait of a Young Lady in a Blue Dress. In its original form, as exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and photographed at the time with the model in front of it, it showed Ira Perrot seated cross-legged in front of cushions piled up exotically in the manner of Bakst’s Sheherazade designs.
Seated Nude
1925
Oil on canvas, 61 × 38 cm
Private Collection
More prophetic both stylistically and in subject matter than these two portraits is another canvas of the same period entitled The Kiss. The erotic theme, played out against an urban back-drop, the element of cubist stylisation that gives the picture an air of modernity and dynamism and the metallic sheen on the gentleman’s top hat all anticipate de Lempicka’s artistic maturity. The crudeness of the technique is as yet far from the enamelled perfection of her best work. Naivety is not in general a quality we associate with de Lempicka but this picture has the look of a cover for a lurid popular novel.
The Model
1925
Oil on canvas, 116 × 73 cm
Barry Friedman Ltd, New York
The following year we find de Lempicka working on a series of large scale and monumental female nudes that might be described as cubified rather than Cubist. These works reflect an interest in the classical and the monumental that was widespread in Western art following the First World War and throughout the inter-war period.
The entire history of Western art from the Ancient world onwards can be seen in terms of a series of major and minor classical revivals. In an essay of 1926 entitled The Call to Order, Jean Cocteau presented the post-war return to classicism as a necessary reaction to the chaos of radical experimentation during the anarchic decade that had preceded the First World War. There was undoubtedly some element of truth in this, though the roots of inter-war classicism can be traced back much further.
Group of Four Nudes
c. 1925
Oil on canvas, 130 × 81 cm
Private Collection
A specifically French version of classicism can be seen as a continuing thread in French art running back as far as Poussin in the seventeenth century. The classicist most often cited in connection with de Lempicka is the nineteenth century painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867). The taste for hard, bright colours and enamelled surfaces, the combination of abstraction and quasi-photographic realism, the eroticising of the female body through the radical distortion of anatomy and the
