Tamara de Lempicka [antikvár]

Cool, disconcerting beauty: this woman is free Ambiguous, for sure. Free, without a doubt. A legend, quite certainly. Tamara de Lempicka, la belle Polonaise, the star of the inter-war 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 results 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 green Bugatti, 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 harmony between woman and object, the one supplied with the name of a great couturier, the other with the emblem of its maker and designer. Customarily we expect an exchange of roles between the two elements of this tableau: the woman becomes an object, in a society like ours based on the concept of possessions, while the automobile appears as the projection of the virile potency of the man who created it. The underlying symbolism presses itself upon one in no uncertain terms: by placing her hand upon the bonnet, beneath Tamara de Lempicka in ihe 1930s Aiifojjorrrail (Tamara in llie Green Bugatti), 1925 Oil on wood, 35 x 26 cm Private collection