Lempicka - Patrick Bade Temporis

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the wars, it was inevitable that de Lempicka would have come into contact with most of the leading artists and intellectuals. Amongst the artists and writers she mixed with were Gide, Marinetti, Cocteau, Marie Laurencin, Foujita, Chagall, Kiesling and Van Dongen. Cocteau, who warned her that she risked ruining her art by too much socialising, would have provided her closest contact with Picasso. Cocteau’s own dazzlingly clever and sophisticated erotic drawings would have provided de Lempicka with an example of how to combine the avant-garde, the classical and the slickly commercial. Lifting nude male figures straight from Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling and other Renaissance and classical sources, Cocteau added the enlarged genitals, curling pubic hair and other attributes of homosexual pornography, all drawn in a spare linear style closely based on Picasso’s neo-classical drawings. The result is Michelangelo and Picasso crossed with Tom of Finland. If the eroticism in de Lempicka’s work is never quite as blatant as Cocteau’s she certainly managed to achieve a similar synthesis of the modern, the illustrational and the commercial in her mature work of the late 1920s.

      In an article published in 1929, the distinguished French critic Arsène Alexandre remarked upon the successful synthesis of classical and modern in de Lempicka’s work, exclaiming “What singular, happy contradictions enable her to convey the impression of such modernity (intense modernity, in my view) while using such purely classical resources? With the apparently chilly style that she sometimes pushes to extremes, by what means can she suggest feelings (not to mention sensations) that are generally connected with the opposite pole? How can she shift from the expression of chastity, unless of course we find it difficult to distinguish one from the other?”

      Suzanne Bathing, c. 1938, Oil on canvas, 90 × 60 cm, Private Collection.

      Art Deco

      Sharing Secrets, 1928. Oil on canvas, 46 × 38 cm, Galleria Campo dei Fiori, Rome.

      Georges Lepape, Cover of Vogue, 15 March 1927.

      The “intense modernity” and “chilliness” of de Lempicka were both expressed through a devotion to the mechanical and the metallic that are characteristic of the period. One of the most distinctive aspects of de Lempicka’s art is the way she paints everything from human flesh to permed hair and crumpled drapery with metallic sheen. One is reminded of Manet’s cutting remark on the military paintings of Ernest Meissonier, that everything looked as though it was made out of metal except the weapons. In de Lempicka’s work though, the metallic quality comes from an aesthetic that is in thrall to the machine.

      As industrialisation spread through the western world in the nineteenth century, the machine began to influence every area of human endeavour. Many artists reacted initially with horror. The French Symbolist painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes suffered from nightmares after visiting the Hall of Machines in the Paris World Exhibition in 1889. For William Morris, the most influential design theorist of the late nineteenth century, the machine represented a threat to everything he held dear. He could not see that the machine could in fact enable the fulfilment of his desire for art and prosperity for the people. It was not until after the turn of the century that architects and designers such as Richard Riemerschmid and Peter Behrens began to perceive the machine as opportunity rather than a threat. Fine artists also began to find machines exciting and beautiful. In the Futurist Manifesto, published in the French newspaper Le Figaro in 1909, Marinetti proclaimed the advent of “a new beauty… a roaring motorcar, which runs like a machine gun, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.” When sitting with Marinetti in the Brasserie La Coupole, de Lempicka became so excited by his rhetoric that she found herself part of a mob chanting “Burn the Louvre.” She claimed that she was only thwarted in this plan by the fact that the police had impounded her improperly parked car.

      The Futurist Manifesto stated “We wish to glorify war.” Certainly the First World War, with mechanized warfare on a hitherto undreamed of scale and the industrialisation of death, while it put paid to the Futurist movement, represented a grim triumph for the machine. The reaction of the painter Fernand Léger, who took part in the war as a common soldier was to move towards an art that was more populist and a style that was profoundly influenced by the aesthetic of the machine. He began painting shiny metallic forms that are not unlike those of de Lempicka.

      The Green Turban, 1929. Oil on panel, 41 × 33 cm, Private Collection.

      The Girls, c. 1930. Oil on panel, 35 × 27 cm, Private collection.

      In the inter-war period, the cult of the machine permeated every aspect of culture and society. Motor cars, express trains, aeroplanes, zeppelins and ocean liners replace nymphs and caryatids as decorative motifs on the façades and ceilings of department stores such as Barker’s in London and Bullocks Wilshire in Los Angeles. Le Corbusier described a house as “a machine for living in.” Buildings such as Broadcasting House in London and the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Los Angeles took on the appearance of immobilised ocean liners, while ocean liners such as the Ile de France, the Normandie, the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth represented the aspirations and ethos of the Art Deco period in a way that cathedrals had done for the Middle Ages and museums and railway stations for the nineteenth century.

      Even in films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis of 1927 and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times of 1936 that aim to warn against the dangers of mechanisation, it is clear that the designers were completely in thrall to the aesthetic of the machine. A naïve and exuberant enthusiasm for the machine is expressed in Hollywood musicals of the Busby Berkeley type in which hundreds of girls in massed formations and all looking as though they themselves have been mass manufactured, move like cogs in a vast machine. The most delightful Hollywood tribute to the aesthetic appeal of the machine is the sequence in the 1937 RKO movie Shall we dance in which Fred Astaire dances to the rhythm of the pistons in the shining and immaculately clean engine room of an ocean liner.

      Music too, was affected by the love of machines, from the motoric rhythms of avant-garde composers such as Stravinsky and Hindemith and the near pictorial evocations of machines in concert pieces such as Alexander Mosolov’s Iron Foundry and Arthur Honneger’s Pacific 231 (that simulates the sounds of an accelerating locomotive) through to the popular dance bands of the period such as Wal-Berg in Paris that loved to mimic the sounds of express trains and urban traffic.

      By the 1930s, the machine and mass production had brought just the kind of democratisation of good design of which William Morris had dreamed. Anyone visiting a flea-market can pick up 1930s mass produced objects in industrial materials such as bakelite and chromed metal that are as sleek and aesthetically satisfying as the most luxurious products of the period. The mass produced objects of the art nouveau period always looked like shabby and cheap imitations of expensively handcrafted pieces. But in an interesting reversal, the most prestigious and expensive craftsmen of the Art Deco period such as the ebonist Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann used the most labour intensive techniques and the most precious materials to reproduce the simple streamlined forms of industrial design.

      The smooth reflective surfaces of the Art Deco style that we see throughout de Lempicka’s best work and in particular in works such as Arlette Boucard with arums of 1931 with its glass topped table and transparent vase, also express a new found desire in western culture for hygiene. The idea that “cleanliness is next to godliness” had not been central to Christian culture prior to the nineteenth century (unlike Jewish and Muslim traditions that had always put great emphasis on personal hygiene). After the notion of germs and the connection between health and hygiene had been established by Louis Pasteur and others in the mid nineteenth century, cleanliness and bathing received greater emphasis in Europe too. As late as the 1880s when the luxurious Savoy Hotel was built in London, eyebrows were raised at the quantities of en suite bathrooms. But by the inter-war period every middle-class household included a bathroom, that was likely to be the most modern and best designed room in the house with germ-free ceramic, glass and chromed metal surfaces. Lavish bathrooms figure largely in the movies of the period. Unfortunately

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