Lempicka: Tamara de Lempicka (Basic Art)

Benedikt Taschen [Published date: 1992]. Soft cover, 80 pp. Text in English. [Excerpt from book] Ambiguous, for sure. Free, without a doubt. A legend, quite certainly. Tamara de Lempicka, la belle Polonaise, the star of the interwar years, had all that it took to symbolize her era. The elite of her era, to be sure, those who frequented the Ritz in Paris or the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo, what today we should call the jet-set. As recently as 1978, the "New York Times" was still calling her the "steely-eyed goddess of the automobile age". And indeed, her most famous painting, a self-portrait entitled Autoportrait or Tamara in the Green Bugatti (illus. p. 6), reveals something of the relationship Tamara had with machines, be they of steel or flesh and blood... Woman-automobile, automobile-woman ... where does one begin and the other end? What sort of relationships do they have with each other and with men? It is difficult to be sure. Just to pose the question is to raise the issue of the whole ambivalence to which Tamara de Lempicka's work bears witness in such abundance. And always, one comes up against that sense of displacement which resuits when, having thought one has solved the mystery, one finds one has to start from the beginning all over again: the initial data were simply wrong. Thus in reality Tamara never possessed a greenBugatti, but only a little bright yellow Renault. What counts, she said, is that "I was always dressed like the car, and the car like me".' One imagines Tamara as the unchallenged star of a fashion contest stepping out of the car and presenting herself to a jury whose members could include the Great Gatsby, Hemingway or Coco Chanel, and then in an elegantly superior attitude - one hand placed casually upon the bonnet - posing in front of the vehicle. Perfect harmany between woman and object, the one supplied with the name of a great couturier, the other with the emblem of its maker and designer.