Tamara de Lempicka

To sum it up, Tamara de Lempicka was the lone traditional easel painter in the entirety of the Art Deco style. Her sources of inspiration ranged dramatically: she adored Italian Renaissance painting; she was characterized by critics as a sort of modern-day Ingres, although the comparisons were more often not intended to flatter; she absorbed the avant garde art of the era - particularly post-cubist abstraction but of a "softened" style. Perhaps most influential was Lempicka's desire to capitalize on her social connections to create a niche for her portraiture, which most often featured well-to-do, cosmopolitan types. The Art Deco style, lavish in a less visually complex way than its predecessor, Art Nouveau, was probably the ideal vehicle for her trendy style. Most notably, despite its decorative quality, her work provided her with an outlet for unconventional self-expression: truly a product of her era, the libertine golden age between the two world wars, Lempicka, a bisexual, made bold, liberated female sexuality the linchpin of her art.

I chose Tamara not only because she is a Feminist artist, but olso because of her incredible style she has. She's the kind of artist that I aspire to be.Just as she once said " My goal was never to copy, but to create a new style, bright, luminous colors and to scent out elegance in my models." .

Lempicka's lifestyle, one in which she flouted her sexual freedom, has made her something of a conundrum for feminist art historians. As she frequently depicted her female lovers and other women - often in pairs or groups - as reveling in their sexuality under the gaze of a female painter, it is possible to regard Lempicka as a kind of proto-feminism. Indeed, as a female painter representing the female nude, she subverted the conventional arrangement in which a naked woman is displayed exclusively for the viewing pleasure of the male onlooker. The result is a kind of egalitarian voyeurism. The caveat may be, however, that as a member of the upper class, Lempicka's freedom was more easily attained and forgiven.

The gleaming surfaces of her sensual portraits are tributes to jazz- and flapper-age decadence following the privations of WWI. She was a favorite artist of the rich and socialites of her time, her popularity continues with celebrities such as Madonna, Jack Nicholson, and Barbra Streisand that enjoy her sharp lines and bold statements of a by-gone age.

The below artworks are the most important by Tamara de Lempicka - that both overview the major creative periods, and highlight the greatest achievements by the artist.

Group of Four Nudes (1925)

Artwork description & Analysis: Lempicka's Four Nudes from 1925 exudes eroticism and powerful femininity. In the picture, four contorted, nude women recline in a complex tangle of rounded, heavily modeled, and sharply outlined body parts. The robust, sensual figures with their sultry expressions are reminiscent of the nude bathers of Lempicka's artistic predecessors - from Ingres and Delacroix to Matisse and Picasso.

Lempicka's figures have been likened to Ingres's fleshy and distorted but elegant bathers, such as those pictured in the work, Turkish Baths (1862). However, the piece must also be analyzed in comparison to Cubist works, including but not exclusively, nudes by Picasso such as Two Nudes (1905) or for that matter, the groundbreaking Les demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). Lempicka absorbed tradition but was also deeply influenced by Cubism.

The shallow background of the picture, which is typical of post-Cubist compositions, has the effect of making the women feel even more compressed within the space, thereby also heightening the eroticism. Art historian Joan Cox argues that "[Lempicka] has chosen to crop her view of the female bathers tightly and give the viewer - a presumably female viewer - the experience of joining in the frolicking. She invites the female viewer in as a lover rather than creating an experience for a male viewer as a distant voyeur into this all female public space." Indeed, works like the nude groupings by Ingres and Picasso presume a male viewer as, at the least, the artists themselves were males. Lempicka subverts that dynamic and, in a way, excludes male viewers altogether.

Oil on canvas - Private collection

Related Art and Artists

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)

Artist: Pablo Picasso

Artwork description & Analysis: This painting was shocking even to Picasso's closest artist friends both for its content and its execution. The subject matter of nude women was not in itself unusual, but the fact that Picasso painted the women as prostitutes in aggressively sexual postures was novel. Picasso's studies of Iberian and tribal art is most evident in the faces of three of the women, which are rendered as mask-like, suggesting that their sexuality is not just aggressive, but also primitive. Picasso also went further with his spatial experiments by abandoning the Renaissance illusion of three-dimensionality, instead presenting a radically flattened picture plane that is broken up into geometric shards, something Picasso borrowed in part from Paul Cézanne's brushwork. For instance, the leg of the woman on the left is painted as if seen from several points of view simultaneously; it is difficult to distinguish the leg from the negative space around it making it appear as if the two are both in the foreground.

The painting was widely thought to be immoral when it was finally exhibited in public in 1916. Braque is one of the few artists who studied it intently in 1907, leading directly to his Cubist collaborations with Picasso. Because Les Demoiselles predicted some of the characteristics of Cubism, the work is considered proto or pre Cubism.

Oil on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York

Three Women (Le Grand Déjeuner) (1921)

Artist: Fernand Léger

Artwork description & Analysis: This is one of Léger's best-known paintings. In it he retreats from the experimentation with dissonance and collage-like space that he utilized in The City. The work is a culmination of several interests in the previous decade with its depiction of three-dimensionality, its mechanical human figures, and its primary colors. The subject matter of three nude women, however, is one of the most traditional in the history of art. In part for this reason, the painting is often seen as a classic example of what is known as a "return to order" that was typical of many artists in the early 1920s as they retreated from some of their bolder pre-World War I experiments with form, space, and subject matter. Though the subject matter is not contemporary as in The Card Players, Léger is not abandoning his interest in everyday people, but is instead responding to a culture-wide interest in past art with the re-opening of the Musée de Cluny and the expansion of the Louvre to include Egyptian and Assyrian rooms.

Oil on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York

Sleep (1866)

Artist: Gustave Courbet

Artwork description & Analysis: This work shows Courbet's interest in an erotic Realism that became prevalent in his later work. Raw eroticism is delivered without aid of cupids or mythological justification of any kind, making this work vulgar to those with the prevailing taste of the day. Such unsanctified nudes provoked much discussion about flaws in Courbet's character and art, but the artist reveled in the added attention and increased reputation as a confrontational artist.

Oil on canvas - Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris

Works of Tamara that I adore:

-Portrait of Madame M