Tamara De Lempicka's Strategic Conservatism

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TAMARA DE LEMPICKA’S STRATEGIC CONSERVATISM

Elizabeth Von Buhr

Submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Art History

Chair:

Juliet Bellow, Ph.D.

Joanne Allen, Ph.D.

Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

May 1, 2020 Date

2020

American University

Washington, D.C. 20016

Elizabeth Von Buhr

2020

TAMARA DE LEMPICKA’S STRATEGIC CONSERVATISM

Elizabeth Von Buhr

ABSTRACT

Tamara de Lempicka’s seemingly pious and traditionalist period of the late 1920s and

1930s, exemplified by paintings such as La Polonaise (1933) and The Communicant (1928), appears to be a sharp departure from the Polish émigré’s celebrated erotic nudes of the early

1920s. This thesis contextualizes this stylistic and thematic shift in de Lempicka’s oeuvre within the increasingly fraught, nationalistic, and politically conservative climate of interwar Paris. I argue that de Lempicka adapted her approach to painting to overcome the increased challenges this environment posed to foreign women artists. Her strategy, which relied upon visual ambiguity and a manipulation of conservative taste, secured her financial and professional artistic success.

I situate de Lempicka’s transition to traditional subjects and a classical revivalist style as part of a larger cultural trend by discussing her work in relation to her artistic milieu and to the

“return to order,” a widespread artistic catalyst of the period. By analyzing the similarities between de Lempicka’s works and those of her contemporaries, including her teacher Maurice

Denis and an organization of women artists known as the FAM (Femmes Artistes Modernes), I consider the influences behind de Lempicka’s strategic conservatism. I discuss de Lempicka’s adaptation of the classicizing elements and conservative connotations of the “return to order.”

Her inventive use of a “return to order” style allowed her to blur the lines between religious and erotic ecstasy in her work, thereby extending her commitment to transgressive subjects and themes while simultaneously appealing to conservative tastes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis would not have been possible without the amazing support of my family, professors, and friends. My parents have been extremely supportive of my academic pursuits from the very beginning. I would like to thank them for making graduate school attainable, for their endless encouragement, and for their incredible patience throughout this process. They have always believed in me and for that I will be forever grateful. I would also like to thank my boyfriend, who offered invaluable moral support and assistance as my sounding board on numerous occasions. I also acknowledge my friends and extended family, whose constant enthusiasm for my work and support of my achievements has given me great joy and motivation.

Of course, I must also recognize Dr. Juliet Bellow, my advisor, who encouraged me to research de Lempicka in my first semester of graduate school. That early research provided the foundation for this thesis and helped shape my professional goals as an art historian. Throughout this process, she has consistently pushed me to refine my ideas, and I am a better writer for it.

Dr. Joanne Allen and Dr. Andrea Pearson also provided much needed fresh perspectives, as well as further insight into the Italian Renaissance and Baroque works I put in conversation with de

Lempicka’s paintings. My professors’ expertise, advice, and commitment to supporting me in this endeavor made this thesis what it is. Thank you!

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1 THE DEVELOPMENT OF STRATEGIC CONSERVATISM ...... 9

Maurice Denis: Precedent and Influence ...... 13 De Lempicka’s Appropriation of Conservative Strategies ...... 21 The FAM and the “Polish Invasion” ...... 26

CHAPTER 2 SUBVERTING THE “RETURN TO ORDER” ...... 36

The “Return to Order” ...... 37 The Ambiguous Politics of Ecstasy ...... 44

CONCLUSION ...... 55

ILLUSTRATIONS ...... 58

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 61

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Tamara de Lempicka, La Belle Rafaela , 1927. Oil on canvas...... 58

Figure 2: Tamara de Lempicka, Portrait de la Duchess de la Salle , 1925. Oil on canvas...... 58

Figure 3: Tamara de Lempicka, La Polonaise (Version 2), 1933. Oil on wood...... 58

Figure 4: Tamara de Lempicka, The Communicant , 1928. Oil on canvas...... 58

Figure 5: Tamara de Lempicka, Mother Superior , 1935. Oil on wood...... 58

Figure 6: Tamara de Lempicka, Maternity , 1922. Oil on canvas...... 58

Figure 7: Maurice Denis, Maternity with Lace Cuff , 1895. Oil on canvas...... 58

Figure 8: Maurice Denis, Mother in a Black Blouse , 1895. Oil on canvas...... 58

Figure 9: Tamara de Lempicka, Maternity , 1928. Oil on canvas...... 58

Figure 10: Maurice Denis and Andre Gide, Le Voyage D’Urien (cover, woodcut), 1893. Text illustrated with lithographs...... 58

Figure 11: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin Rouge: La Goulue , 1891. Color lithograph...... 58

Figure 12: Maurice Denis, The Muses , 1893. Oil on canvas...... 58

Figure 13: Fra Angelico, The Annunciation , c. 1438-47. Fresco, (Convent of San Marco, Florence)...... 58

Figure 14: Maurice Denis, The Communicants , first panel of Frauenliebe und Leben (Women’s Love and Life), 7- panel bedroom frieze, 1895. Distemper on canvas mounted on wood. Photograph taken 1898...... 58

Figure 15: Paul Gauguin, Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) , 1888. Oil on canvas...... 58

Figure 16: Maurice Denis, The Breton Dance , 1891. Oil on canvas...... 58

Figure 17: Maurice Denis, Screen with Doves , four-panel screen, 1896...... 58

Figure 18: Maurice Denis, Vault decorations for the Sacred Heart Chapel , Church of Sainte- Marguerite, Le Vésinet, 1903. Photo from before fire damage to the decorations in 2009...... 58

Figure 19: Jacopo da Pontormo, Portrait of Maria Salviati de' Medici and Giulia de' Medici , c.1539. Oil on canvas...... 58

Figure 20: Tamara de Lempicka, Breton Girl , 1934. Oil on canvas...... 58

Figure 21: Tamara de Lempicka, Woman with Dove , 1931. Oil on canvas...... 59

Figure 22: Mela Muter, Mother and Child with Haloes , 1916. Oil on canvas...... 59

Figure 23: Marie Blanchard, Maternity , 1925. Oil on canvas...... 59

Figure 24: Tamara de Lempicka, At the Window , 1932. Oil on canvas...... 59

Figure 25: Zofia Stryjenska, Boy at the Window , from the series Youthful Polish Villages, 1930...... 59

Figure 26: Moise Kisling, Woman in a Polish Shawl , 1928. Oil on canvas...... 59

Figure 27: Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People , 1830. Oil on canvas...... 59

Figure 28: Glykon von Athen, Farnese Hercules , 216 AD. Marble...... 59

Figure 29: Pablo Picasso, Three Women at the Spring , 1921. Oil on canvas...... 59

Figure 30: Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman , 1921. Pastel on paper...... 59

Figure 31: Le Corbusier, Still Life , 1920. Oil on canvas...... 59

Figure 32: L’Esprit Nouveau, No. 10 (July 1921), pages 1140 and 1141...... 59

Figure 33: Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, detail of The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa , 1647-52. Marble. 59

Figure 34: Tamara de Lempicka, Peasant Girl with a Pitcher , 1937. Oil on board...... 59

Figure 35: Tamara de Lempicka, Peasant Girl , 1937. Oil on board...... 59

Figure 36: Tamara de Lempicka, The Blue Virgin , 1934. Oil on board...... 59

Figure 37: Tamara de Lempicka, Madonna , 1937. Oil on panel...... 59

Figure 38: Tamara de Lempicka, Saint Anthony , 1936. Oil on canvas...... 59

Figure 39: Tamara de Lempicka, Saint John the Baptist , 1936. Oil on cardboard...... 59

Figure 40: Tamara de Lempicka, Woman with a Mandolin , 1929. Oil on canvas...... 59

Figure 41: Tamara de Lempicka, Adam and Eve , 1931. Oil on canvas...... 59

Figure 42: Tamara de Lempicka, Graziella , 1937. Oil on board...... 59

Figure 43: Tamara de Lempicka, S tudy of a Face, on the Model of the Madonna of the Magnificat by Botticelli , 1938. Pencil on paper...... 59

Figure 44: Tamara de Lempicka, Study for “The Round Dance ,” 1932. Pencil on paper...... 59

Figure 45: Tamara de Lempicka, Study for “St Teresa of Avila ,” 1930. Pencil on paper...... 59

Figure 46: Tamara de Lempicka, Saint Teresa d’Avila , 1930. Oil on canvas...... 60

Figure 47: Members of the Cornaro family, with the patron Federico Cornaro shown second from the right (detail), Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ecstasy of St. Teresa , 1645-52 (Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome)...... 60

Figure 48: Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc , directed by Carl Th. Dreyer, 1928. . 60

Figure 49: Tamara de Lempicka, Andromeda , 1929. Oil on canvas...... 60

Figure 50: Tamara de Lempicka, Kizette in Pink , 1926. Oil on canvas...... 60

Figure 51: Tamara de Lempicka, Reclining Nude with a Book , 1927. Oil on canvas...... 60

Figure 52: Tamara de Lempicka, La Polonaise (The Polish Girl 1, Version 1), 1933. Oil on wood, Lost...... 60

Figure 53: Tamara de Lempicka, Portrait of Gino Puglisi , 1949. Oil on canvas...... 60

Figure 54: Tamara de Lempicka, Portrait de Marjorie Ferry , 1932. Oil on canvas...... 60

Figure 55: Tamara de Lempicka, La Tunique Rose , 1927. Oil on canvas...... 60

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INTRODUCTION

This thesis concerns the artist Tamara de Lempicka (1898 - 1980), a Polish émigré whose eroticized paintings of female nudes, such as La Belle Rafaela (1927, fig. 1), and elite portrait commissions, such as her Portrait de la Duchess de la Salle (1925, fig. 2) catapulted her to celebrity in 1920s Paris. While scholars have begun to embrace de Lempicka’s early paintings, often reading them as evidence of the artist’s lesbian identity, they have all but ignored the rest of her forty-year career. This thesis addresses de Lempicka’s works of the late 1920s and 1930s, generally referred to as the artist’s “religious” or “conservative” period. These paintings of pious figures and peasants do not, at first glance, fit into the dominant narratives of de Lempicka as the

“Perverse Ingres,” an “Art Deco Icon,” or the “Queen of Modern.” 1 However, I argue that seemingly pious works such as La Polonaise (1933, fig. 3) and The Communicant (1928, fig. 4) extend de Lempicka’s commitment to transgressive subjects and themes, albeit in a more oblique fashion.

The objective of this thesis is to contextualize de Lempicka’s apparent shift from contemporary portraits and erotic nudes to more modest, traditional subjects between the 1920s and the 1930s. The dominant understanding is that her change in subject matter indicates a congruent move from libertinism to conservatism, brought on by an alteration in the artist’s personal attitudes. I instead situate de Lempicka’s art as a response to the increasing dominance of right-wing politics in interwar Paris. Following the chaos and devastation of the First World

War (1914 - 1918), France experienced a reactionary period of political conservatism, which

1 Paula Birnbaum, “Painting the Perverse: Tamara de Lempicka and the Modern Woman Artist,” in The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars , ed. Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003): 100; Alain Blondel, Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2004); Gioia Mori, Tamara de Lempicka: The Queen of Modern (Milano: Skira, 2011): 20.

promised the return of national stability and order. This rightist response was linked to rising nationalist rhetoric and a resurgence of Catholicism. These congruent trends aligned in a promotion of French unity and traditional moral values as guards against the immoral decadence and individualistic attitudes that became associated with the start of the war. This political move to the right was paralleled by an artistic and cultural phenomenon known as the “return to order.”

Coined by the painter André Lhote (1885 - 1962) in 1919, the “return to order” called for a rejection of the stylistically obscure and thematically risqué art of the prewar period, in favor of a return to classicizing, legible figuration. 2 The 1929 Wall Street crash, which hit the French art market in 1931, further exacerbated this conservative ethos by creating an even greater need for stability and security.3 The depression had a devastating effect on the art economy, causing a third of Parisian commercial galleries to close and many more to break their existing contracts with artists. 4 Artists were forced to adapt in numerous ways, including selling their works directly to collectors themselves, often at reduced prices.

All of these developments, I argue, affected de Lempicka’s adoption of a strategic approach to artmaking. It is not a coincidence that de Lempicka experienced a decline in commissioned portraits just as an economic depression began. With a lack of sitters for portraits, she may have switched tactics to appeal to different buyers.5 By appropriating the visual cues of

2 Theodore Ziolkowski, Classicism of the Twenties: Art, Music, and Literature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015): 44-45. Lhote first coined this term in a review of an exhibition of George Braque’s paintings, where he observed that Braque’s and Picasso’s oeuvres exhibited a kind of “rappel à l’ordre.”

3 Christopher Green, Art in France: 1900-1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000): 68.

4 Toby Daniel Fortescue Norris, "Modern Artists and the State in France between the Two World Wars,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Northwestern University, 2005): 188.

5 This theory is supported by de Lempicka’s choice of materials for her 1930s works. Unlike her earlier paintings on canvas, many of these works are done on wood-board or cardboard, a cheaper alternative. They are also diminutive in size compared to her earlier works, her Mother Superior (1935) for example being just 30 x 20 cm. 2

the “return to order” in her paintings, de Lempicka was able to manipulate its conservative associations to cater to patrons increasingly drawn to traditional subjects and the classical revivalist style. With this political and artistic context in mind, I argue that de Lempicka reformed her painting method to successfully navigate her environment, a project referred to in this thesis as “strategic conservatism.” 6

In emphasizing the importance of political and cultural context to de Lempicka’s oeuvre,

I aim to correct the tendency to equate the artist’s life with the art she produced. Such a biographical approach often oversimplifies an artist’s work, an especially problematic issue when it comes to the study of women artists. As numerous feminist art historians have pointed out, while the details of male artists’ lives are typically used to support claims to individual genius and mythicize their oeuvres, biography has a contradictory impact when used to interpret the work of women artists. 7 The details of women artists’ lives are often used to position them as exceptions or outliers to the male norm, consequently reducing their art to a direct representation of their personal life and psychological state. Despite the drawbacks of relying upon biographical interpretations, they are commonly utilized to claim significance for women artists. The same is not true for male artists, whose work is more likely to be interpreted with more serious and historically motivated methods.8

6 This way of describing the artist’s methodology shares some similarity with Darby English’s concept for a new art historical methodology, which he calls “strategic formalism.” English recommends a practice “interested in the peculiarity of works within their varied contexts of meaning, responsive to the specific artistic operations that often manifest relations and difference to which culturalist regimes of reception must remain blind.” Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007): 32.

7 Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge, 1999): 106; Nanette Salomon, “The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission,” in (En)gendering Knowledge: Feminists in Academe , Ed. Joan E. Hartman and Ellen Messer-Davidow (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991): 229.

8 Kristen Frederickson and Sarah E. Webb, Singular Women: Writing the Artist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003): 14.

In de Lempicka’s case, the predominance of biography in the scholarship on her oeuvre is influenced by a biography published by her daughter Kizette de Lempicka-Foxhall soon after the artist’s death in 1980. De Lempicka-Foxhall presents a biased and rather negative account of her mother’s life. She emphasizes her mother’s sexual relationships with various models, and condemns her preference to attend glamorous social functions and parties rather than spend time with her own daughter. 9 Another prominent contributor to de Lempicka’s story is Laura

Claridge’s 1999 biography, likely influenced by de Lempicka-Foxhall’s earlier, sensationalizing narrative. While Claridge’s account corrects some factual errors about the artist’s life, her narrative continues to perpetuate biographical readings of de Lempicka’s oeuvre, often claiming psychological motivations for her choices of subjects. 10 These two influential recitations of de

Lempicka’s life story focus on the artist’s various love affairs and her personal life at the expense of her intellectual and professional career as an artist. This emphasis on personal drama often leads to troubling conjectures about de Lempicka’s oeuvre, such as believing that her work is only capable of expressing her individual desires and trauma.

De Lempicka’s work of the 1930s suffers the most from such biographical treatment.

This period of her career is only superficially addressed in the existing scholarship; it has been

9 Kizette de Lempicka-Foxhall, and Charles Phillips, Passion by Design: The Art and Times of Tamara de Lempicka (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987): 71. The story presented of these affairs often goes beyond sensationalizing, at times presenting quite disturbing descriptions of non-consensual sexual encounters. In particular, this biography contains an entire chapter devoted to de Lempicka’s relationship with the much older Gabriele D’Annunzio, an Italian poet and playwright. This story is almost entirely told through the lens of a maid of the household, Aelis Mazoyer, who documented their supposed encounter in her diary. This diary was so theatrical and dramatic that it later became the basis of a play about de Lempicka, and the story has featured in numerous publications about the artist and her work since then. The artist herself later condemned claims made by Mazoyer, stating in an interview, “Portrait of the Artist,” with Joanne Harrison for Houston City Magazine in 1979 that “This is not my work, my art […] All that people will remember or know about me is this servant’s lies.”

10 Laura Claridge, Tamara de Lempicka: A Life of Deco and Decadence (New York, New York: Clarkson Potter Publishers, 1999): 207. Claridge often perpetuates the drama surrounding de Lempicka’s life. In addition, Claridge goes so far as to claim that she was able to sense the presence of the artist’s ghost upon the writing of this biography.

deemed unworthy of extensive study due to perceived links between the work’s seemingly unserious spiritual and psychological nature and de Lempicka’s period of depression around the same time. Alain Blondel, for example, describes these works as products of a “mental affliction” and “soul-searching” in the artist’s time of distress. 11 Such descriptions, which portray the artist’s work as unintellectual, highly personal, and emotionally motivated, have unfortunately come to define the narrative on this period of de Lempicka’s oeuvre. Additionally, biographically inspired interpretations can often have problematic gendered connotations. Patrick

Bade refers to this period as a result of de Lempicka nearing the age of forty, claiming “that like many fast living women whose beauty has begun to fade, she turned to religion for comfort.” 12

Statements like these are denigrating, suggesting the artist’s work be read, and therefore assigned value, on the basis of her sexual attractiveness. By reducing her work to a product of female distress, scholars overlook de Lempicka’s potential agency as an active participant in her historical moment or social milieu.

In part, such shocking and dismissive descriptions stem from de Lempicka’s own tendency to self-mythologize. De Lempicka was known to fabricate stories about herself, obscuring the truth with embellished fantasies. 13 She has even lied about her place of birth. 14 In

11 Blondel, Art Deco Icon , 27. This claim, although supported by most scholars through their dismissive language or complete lack of attention, is presented most definitively by Alain Blondel, the author of multiple exhibition catalogue introductions to the work of de Lempicka. As an early authority figure in the scholarship on de Lempicka, he effectively writes off an entire decade of artistic output as undeserving of critical attention, even noting that it was this uncertainty of life that lead de Lempicka to refer to the religious art of the Italian Renaissance.

12 Patrick Bade, Tamara de Lempicka (New York: Parkstone International, 2012): 100.

13 Claridge, Tamara de Lempicka, 3-5. Claridge acknowledges the issues of De Lempicka’s biography and attempts to overcome it by providing new factual information about De Lempicka’s origins. This information confirms that de Lempicka often lied about her life story, even as to where she claimed to have been born.

14 Claridge, Tamara de Lempicka , 11. Claridge clarifies that the artist was born in Moscow, not Warsaw as she always claimed, to a wealthy Polish mother and Russian Jewish father.

particular, the artist’s dramatic narration of how she came to paint her 1935 work, Mother

Superior (fig. 5), can be cited as one of the main influences behind statements made by scholars such as Bade and Blondel. She recalls visiting a convent and seeing in the face of the institution’s mother superior “all the suffering of the world,” inspiring her to paint “as if in a trance” a vision of the holy woman. 15 The artist describes her work on the painting as a kind of depression-induced hallucinogenic event, feeding into a psychological reading of the painting and contributing to the notion that her work from this period lacks avant-garde seriousness or socio-historical motivations.

While de Lempicka’s habit of falsifying her past complicates the use of biography to interpret her work, it also reveals the artist’s deliberate attempt to manipulate her life story to achieve her own aims. De Lempicka was actively mobilizing ideas about herself and her work in order to construct a public persona: fashionable, wealthy, successful, eccentric, independent.

Marginalized figures with unstable financial and professional security, like de Lempicka, were often forced to resort to such tactics in order to overcome the numerous obstacles to their success. However, the strategies they implemented out of necessity are often interpreted in the

15 De Lempicka-Foxhall, Passion by Design, 127-28. De Lempicka claims “I was in an artist’s depression. When you create, create, create and put out so much of yourself, you become drained and depressed. I had gone to Italy to deal with the depression, and there I suddenly decided to give it all up, to enter a convent near Parma.” “There was the mother superior, and on her face all the suffering of the world, so terrible to look at, so sad, and I rushed out of the room. I forgot for what I came there. I knew only that I must have canvas and brushes and paint her, this face.” “I take from my hotel black cloth and white cloth and in the studio I put them on an old armchair that is on the podium in the good light and then I see her, the mother superior. It was as if I am in a trance, a fever. I talked to her and told her to turn more to the left and so on and so on. After three weeks I worked and worked, and it was finally finished.”

scholarship as “pandering” to the public, implying a lack of true artistic spirit or value. 16 Such an assumption disregards issues of privilege, and the fact that not all artists have the complete freedom to radically experiment in open rebellion against society’s demands. In the case of de

Lempicka, given her conscious effort to overcome the obstacles to her success caused by her gender, outsider identity, and lack of financial stability by controlling her public image, it is also likely that she would have utilized the practice of strategic conservatism. De Lempicka molded both herself and her work to suit her changing social and artistic context.

In order to rectify the problematic narrative created by biographically inspired interpretations of de Lempicka’s oeuvre, I build upon the work begun by scholars such as Paula

Birnbaum, Gioia Mori, and Katarzyna Nowakowska-Sito. Each of these authors has conducted ground-breaking research to place de Lempicka’s work of the early 1920s in the context of her female patrons and participation in émigré artist communities. For instance, Birnbaum has explored de Lempicka’s early nudes and portraits of elite women within the context of Parisian left-bank lesbian culture. 17 She has also analyzed de Lempicka’s membership in the Société des

16 A broader example of this issue is the debate between “Salon” and “Gallery” Cubism. Studies of “Gallery” Cubism, or the work of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, often overlook other artists who had a hand in the development of Cubism and fail to recognize the specific financial factors that made Picasso and Braque’s privileged private collaboration possible. These two artists were free to explore radical experimentation without any marketing concerns because their dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, financially supported them and exhibited their work in his gallery. Other artists, known as the “Salon Cubists,” lacked such access and support. Therefore, they were forced to make a name for themselves in the traditional context of Salon exhibitions. Although often considered derivative of Picasso and Braque, artists such as Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger were vastly instrumental in theorizing Cubism, through their 1912 Du Cubism , and bringing Cubism into the public conversation. “Salon” versus “Gallery” Cubism debates question traditional art historical value systems and reveal that unprivileged artists are often marginalized within the dominant narrative. See Neil Cox, Cubism (London: Phaidon, 2000); Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001); and Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism , trans. by Henry Aronson (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1949).

17 Birnbaum, “Painting the Perverse.” Unfortunately, such scholarship can often result in the unintentional pigeonholing of de Lempicka as a lesbian artist, which is just one facet of her complex identity and oeuvre. De Lempicka has today become popularized as a symbol of empowerment for the LGBTQ community and her work is much collected by celebrities. Such popularization of her work has unfortunately led to her being seen as less serious and sometimes kitschy in scholarly circles.

Femmes Artistes Modernes (FAM), a Parisian organization of female artists, often émigrés, created in the 1930s and devoted to promoting individual diverse approaches to art. 18 Mori and

Nowakowska-Sito have broadened the scholarship in this area, exploring how de Lempicka’s was influenced by other female Polish artists working in Paris, and how she fashioned a specifically Polish persona for herself. 19 This thesis relies upon such research to provide greater insight into de Lempicka’s adept negotiation of the avant-garde of interwar Paris.

This thesis analyzes de Lempicka’s strategic approach to painting in relation to her artistic contemporaries and her historical and cultural contexts. In Chapter 1, I claim that

Maurice Denis (1870 - 1943), de Lempicka’s teacher, informed her methods for attracting patrons. Denis was a French artist who achieved financial success in an equally conservative period, the 1880s - 90s, through a synthesis of classically inspired tradition and modern style.

Furthermore, I argue that de Lempicka expanded and honed her practice through her membership in the FAM during the 1930s. The organization’s outward appearance of conformity to traditionalist trends allowed her to explore subtle artistic transgressions, modelled on the work of her FAM peers, in relative safety. Chapter 2 argues that de Lempicka cultivated ambiguity in her work to explore the expressive possibilities of the female body while also participating in the

“return to order.” Works such as La Polonaise and The Communicant blur the lines between erotic and religious ecstasy, revealing her creative approach to the “return to order.” The flexible reading of such works allowed de Lempicka to explore transgressive interests without losing the potential to appeal to conservative markets and patrons.

18 Paula Birnbaum, “Framing Femininities” in Women Artists in Interwar France: Framing Femininities (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011).

19 Nowakowska-Sito, “Tamara de Lempicka and Poland,” in Tamara de Lempicka: The Queen of Modern (Milano: Skira, 2011).

CHAPTER 1

THE DEVELOPMENT OF STRATEGIC CONSERVATISM

This chapter examines de Lempicka’s active engagement with her artistic milieu: I discuss her indebtedness to French artist Maurice Denis, one of her few artistic mentors, and her membership in the FAM, the only artist group with which she officially associated. After losing the elite portrait commissions that had been the foundation of her financial stability, de

Lempicka relied upon these sources to inform her new approach to painting, with the goal of attracting the interest of alternative markets. De Lempicka’s approach, evident in works such as

La Polonaise and The Communicant , exhibits clear formal, stylistic, thematic, and content driven inspiration from both Denis and her female and immigrant artist contemporaries. While Denis’s synthetic style, religious content, and enigmatic symbolism provided the foundation for de

Lempicka’s financially and professionally successful strategic appeal to conservative patrons, the

FAM supported de Lempicka’s desire to go beyond a straightforward capitulation to conservative demands. The FAM gave de Lempicka the tools required to implement covert transgressions and subtle challenges through her paintings to the very values, norms, and ideas her right-wing clientele desired.

The origin of de Lempicka’s strategic conservatism, I propose, lies in her engagement with the artistic theories and practices of Maurice Denis. Denis is best known for his part in co- founding an artists’ group called the Nabis in 1888 with fellow artists Paul Sérusier (1864 -

1927) and Pierre Bonnard (1867 - 1947). While the aims of the Nabis (meaning “prophet” in

Hebrew) were wide and their styles diverse, they shared a desire to reframe painting as decoration; strove to eliminate the boundaries between the “high” art of painting and the “low” art of craft; and were devoted to reinvigorating traditional art. Denis was the Nabis’ primary theoretician and most avid promoter, outlining their likeminded artistic aims in his 1890 9

manifesto, “Définition du Néo-traditionnisme” (“The Definition of Neo-Traditionism”). 20

Denis’s manifesto urged artists to strive for a synthesis of modernism and classical tradition in their art. This went against the dominant avant-garde inclinations of the period, which saw most modern art movements define themselves on a radical rejection of artistic traditions and values of the past. Denis’s steadfast desire to uphold tradition made him the most conservative member of the Nabis. He used this reputation to navigate the French art scene of the 1880s - 90s, which was impacted by rising nationalism, anti-Semitism, and regional religious revivals. I argue that de

Lempicka modelled her cultivation of conservative interest in her work on Denis’s successful methods; this includes his stylistic synthesis of modernism and classical tradition, his embrace of

Catholic subjects, and the ambiguous symbolism characteristic of his art.

De Lempicka expanded upon Denis’s program by incorporating strategies promoted and explored by the FAM, which she joined in 1932. The FAM was an exhibition-oriented organization for female artists founded in 1930 by Marie-Anne Camax-Zoegger (1881 - 1952), a bourgeois French-Catholic artist. 21 Under Camax-Zoegger’s direction, the FAM tactically rode the line between a public display of conservatism and an surreptitious exploration of diverse styles, themes, and identities in the subtext of their works.22 Camax-Zoegger’s own art upheld

French traditions through conventional style and content, adhering to governmental ideologies

20 Denis famously stated in his “Définition du Néo-traditionnisme,” Arts et Critique (23 and 30 Aug. 1890): “It is well to remember that a picture – before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote – is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.” Although seemingly a rather obvious statement, this passage is oft quoted for its highly influential applicability to the pursuit of modern art. It encapsulated the notion of art as art, regardless of its content, and recognition of the inherent decorative quality of painting as colors assembled on a surface.

21 Birnbaum, “Framing Femininities,” 4. Camax-Zoegger formed the FAM as a modern alternative to the Union of Women Painters and Sculptors, an academically oriented group that was criticized by avant-garde circles for its lack of stylistic and thematic innovations.

22 Birnbaum, “Framing Femininities,” 3.

and “appealing to the patriarchal values of the political establishment.” 23 This allowed the group to maintain funding and secure patronage, but their very nature as a group of mainly non-French, female artists was in itself progressive. Camax-Zoegger’s clever navigation of an environment generally unsupportive of women artists led to the wide public success of the members of the group, including de Lempicka. In addition, by presenting a conservative front, the FAM was able to foster a more welcoming, secure environment for women artists to pursue their own unique and often subversive artistic goals. This environment gave de Lempicka the foundation and tools necessary to make the transgressive aspects of her work more subtle and ambiguous. After she began exhibiting with the organization, de Lempicka began to implement techniques for masking the progressive subtext of her art. These progressive messages often subtly opposed the nationalist, masculine dominated rhetoric, traditional morals, and Catholic values of the period.

Despite her clear involvement with the work of her contemporaries, de Lempicka consistently removed the history of her education under Denis and her membership in the FAM from renditions of her life story, in an apparent effort to portray herself as a completely self- taught and independent artist. 24 Many scholars have taken de Lempicka at her word, seeing no reason to explore how she was influenced by her teachers and peers, or why she chose to so avidly deny their impact on her work. Although de Lempicka never specified any particular motivations behind her choice to distance her art from that of her milieu, there are numerous understandable reasons why she would consider distancing herself from Maurice Denis specifically. These include his right-wing politics, his questionable avant-garde status, and de

Lempicka’s desire to construct a persona of an entirely independent female artist, as opposed to

23 Birnbaum, “Framing Femininities,” 5.

24 Claridge, Tamara de Lempicka, 72.

being seen as a “Denis manqué,” or derivative of her teacher. 25 Being seen as a Denis manqué

would unjustly place de Lempicka as a lesser imitator of Denis, disregarding the two-sided

nature of artistic exchanges and the possibility for her divergence or evolution beyond Denis.

De Lempicka’s claim of a certain level of independence was especially important for her professional success. Female artists faced extra criticism in this regard, as they were more likely

to be seen as inferior to the typically male artist who was credited with teaching them all they

knew. 26 While connections to established male artists could improve a female artist’s chance of

having her work exhibited, it could also backfire by seeming to invite critics and scholars to

discuss her art only in terms of comparison to her male counterpart in perpetuity. 27 As Claridge

suggests, de Lempicka was surrounded by cautionary tales, such as the marriage of fellow Polish

artists Alice Halicka (1894 - 1975) and Louis Marcoussis (1878 - 1941).28 Halicka thrived

artistically while Marcoussis was away, fighting in the First World War. Her art suffered,

however, after he returned, for he encouraged her to pursue the more “feminine” art of fabric

design and collage. De Lempicka did not want to suffer a similar fate. Therefore, her often

25 Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922-1947 (London: Reaktion Books, 2007). Mitter’s concept of the “Picasso manqué syndrome” is defined as the commonly held belief that non-Western modernism is derivative of Western art, such as Cubism, and artists such as Picasso. While Mitter uses this concept to understand the complex relationship between Western modernism and Indian modernism, the concept can also be applied more broadly to the study of how art deemed stylistically derivative of another is often denigrated due to a complex system of established authority and power hierarchies. These hierarchies of value are often determined by factors outside the actual art object, including gender, race, and region of origin.

26 Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1988): 168-69.

27 Mori, The Queen of Modern , 379; Claridge, Tamara de Lempicka, 98. De Lempicka only ever recognized André Lhote as her teacher. Lhote’s, and André Gide’s, positions on the Salon d’Automne’s jury in 1923 likely boosted de Lempicka’s chance of being able to show her work in that year’s exhibition and thereby start her professional artistic career. Even though she benefited from these connections, it is also important to note that during this exhibition she signed her works with the male form of her last name, Lempitzky. By giving her work the appearance of a male creator, de Lempicka attempted, rather successfully, to preemptively counteract any gendered criticism or attributions to her work.

28 Claridge, Tamara de Lempicka, 84-85.

dismissive attitude towards criticism of her artistic training was a reaction against this unfortunate reality and an effort to avoid appearing subservient to a more established male artist.

Despite these drawbacks, an analysis of the artistic relationship between Denis and de

Lempicka proves a useful tool to provide a fresh perspective on de Lempicka’s conservative period in this chapter. I make this connection not because de Lempicka’s work was in any way an imitation or derivative of Denis. Far from it: I argue that de Lempicka’s approach diverged from Denis’s in significant ways. However, as we will see, an exploration of the similarities between the two artists demonstrates that de Lempicka’s seeming traditionalism was less a product of a feminine breakdown, and more an astute navigation of her historical context in dialogue with her artistic milieu.

Maurice Denis: Precedent and Influence

Most scholars only briefly acknowledge the formal similarities between the art of de

Lempicka and Denis, neglecting to address the full extent of his influence on her work. Denis was de Lempicka’s teacher for a brief period during her enrollment at the Académie Ranson in

1920. The Académie was founded in 1908 by Paul Ranson (1864 - 1909) as an art school designed to disseminate the aesthetics and techniques of the Nabis, a group that included both

Ranson and Denis among its members. Denis had been working as a professor at the Académie

Ranson along with the other Nabis since 1909, and was noted to be a particularly gifted teacher. 29 Although he stopped teaching at the Académie the year after de Lempicka enrolled, she would have taken at least some influence from him given that he was one of her first, and

29 Gloria Lynn Groom, Beyond the Easel: Decorative Paintings by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890-1930 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2001): 145.

few, artistic mentors. 30 Indeed, many of her early works echo Denis in terms of both style and subject matter. For example, Gioia Mori convincingly suggests that de Lempicka’s 1922

Maternity (fig. 6) is formally adapted from Denis’s Maternity with Lace Cuff (fig. 7) and Mother in a Black Blouse (fig. 8), both from 1895. 31 This early influence of Denis on de Lempicka’s oeuvre extends to her later works, including her 1928 Maternity (fig. 9). I argue that her works from this later period are not only formally influenced by Denis, but also reveal a canny understanding of his strategies for appealing to conservative buyers.

De Lempicka may have been wary of emphasizing her connection to Denis because of his conservative politics, which colored his critical reception both during and after his career. Like de Lempicka, Denis worked in a divisive political atmosphere, in which artistic style was often conflated with political opinion. French politics in the 1890s were dominated by the Dreyfus

Affair (1894 -1899), a scandal that centered on Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French officer of

Jewish descent who was accused of treason. The Affair politically and socially divided the Third

French Republic between those who believed in Dreyfus’s innocence (Dreyfusards) and those who condemned him (anti-Dreyfusards). Denis was in the later camp, along with many right- wing, anti-Semitic, and Catholic intellectuals. The division “elevated nationalism to a state religion,” with an anti-Dreyfusard position becoming synonymous with Catholicism and an identification with French tradition. 32

30 Beyond their professional academic relationship, de Lempicka and Denis were also part of the same artistic and intellectual milieu. A major figure who further linked the two artists was André Gide, who’s theories also impacted de Lempicka. Gide and Denis were artistic collaborators, their most famous collaboration being Le Voyage D’Urien (fig. 10), a synthetic Symbolist book which combined Gide’s poetic prose with Denis’s stylized lithographs. Both men were promoters of Classicism and its moral virtues, and their support of “return to order” ideals likely influenced de Lempicka’s own relationship to such theories.

31 Mori, The Queen of Modern , 110, 114.

32 Groom, Beyond the Easel , 40.

During the age of the Affair, the Nabis were also divided. Denis described their split along similar lines to larger national fissures, grouping artists and intellectuals into those who appreciated “Latin taste” and those who favored “Semitic taste.” 33 Denis defined “Semitic taste” as having less emphasis on figuration, a rough surface, and taking inspiration directly from nature and memory. These were qualities commonly seen as avant-garde during this period. In contrast, the “Latin taste” gave more attention to the human figure, had a smooth surface, and adhered to the rational, ordered, and proportional aspects of traditional painting. For Denis, this tradition began with the decorative art of the ancient Greeks, Assyrians, Egyptians, and Hindus, and was elevated by the art of the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance.34 By classifying artists and patrons in this way, Denis related painting style to broader political and social preferences. He put himself firmly in the “Latin” camp, along with fellow Symbolist artists and writers, Ranson, Sérusier, and André Gide (1869 - 1951), and his primary patron, Henry Lerolle

(1848 - 1929), a devout Catholic.

The conservatism of Denis’s politics is often linked to a perception of his style as equally traditional. His work, and that of the Nabis more generally, has often been overlooked by today’s scholars, and critics of their own time, in favor of the more stylistically radical paintings of artists such as Georges Seurat (1859 - 1891) and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 - 1901), which overtly rejected tradition and questioned bourgeois morality.35 For example, Toulouse-

Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge: La Goulue (1891, fig. 11), a lithographic poster with radically simplified graphics and design, depicts a raunchy advertisement for a transgressive celebrity act

33 Groom, Beyond the Easel , 33.

34 Denis, “Définition du Néo-traditionnisme.”

35 Groom, Beyond the Easel , 143.

at a famous contemporary entertainment venue. This contrasts sharply with Denis’s The Muses

(1893, fig. 12), which depicts modestly dressed women in a timeless, natural setting. In addition to the content, Denis’s application of ornamental patterning to the dresses and forest floor of the scene, and his reference to ancient Greek tradition, appear rather tame and conventional next to the work of Toulouse-Lautrec. Due to the easy fit a transgressive artist like Toulouse-Lautrec would seem to have as motivation for de Lempicka’s artistic interests in the erotic, it is perhaps ironic that her work more closely relates to that of Denis. However, when the financial stability of these artists’ careers are compared, it becomes clear why de Lempicka would have wished to follow Denis’s example. 36

Denis’s stylistic theories, subjects, and themes impacted de Lempicka’s works of the late

1920s and 1930s, despite her reluctance to admit his influence. Both artists embraced constructive conservatism in similar historical periods of great cultural uncertainty and international crisis, and each participated in their own period’s broader turns to the classical tradition. As Groom notes, the key difference between Denis and the “return to order” artists of the post-war period was that Denis did not need to return to the classical tradition because he had never left it. He, like the other Nabis, had been trained to see the relevance of tradition for the modern day and taught to think about it allegorically. 37 Because de Lempicka was taught by

Denis, she would have similarly been taught the importance of the classical tradition for modern painting. Denis’s respect for tradition, strive for modernized Classicism, and use of ambiguity

36 Toulouse-Lautrec was financially destitute by 1899, while Denis was selling his work to elite wealthy buyers. For example, Denis’s The Muses was commissioned by a frequent patron of the Nabis and senior bureaucrat in the French government, Arthur Fontaine. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Herbert D. Schimmel, The Letters of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec , ed. Herbert D. Schimmel and Translated by Divers Hands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 345-47; Guy Cogeval, Masterpieces from Paris: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne & Beyond; Post- Impressionism from the Musée D'Orsay (Canberra, A.C.T.: National Gallery of Australia, 2009).

37 Groom, Beyond the Easel , 23.

were tools used to appeal to the “Latin taste” of his patrons and secure professional success in a contentious and politically driven climate. This approach to painting impressed on de Lempicka early in her career an eye for strategic conservatism and its professional application.

For Denis, the classical tradition was exemplified by “primitive” quattrocento fresco artists like Fra Angelico (ca. 1395 - 1455), whose work Denis saw during his first trip to Italy in

1895. 38 Early Renaissance frescoes, such as Fra Angelico’s Annunciation (c. 1438 - 47, fig. 13), would become key influences on Denis’s attempts to modernize tradition. Denis wanted to imbue modern painting with the quattrocento era’s aesthetic and moral ideals of purity, order, and tradition. Not only was this a goal outlined by Denis in his “Définition du Néo-traditionnisme,” but it was also an aim noticed and perpetuated by contemporary critical responses to his work. In

1899, critic Jules Meier-Graefe praised the combination of modernism and tradition found in

Denis’s 1895 7- panel bedroom frieze, Frauenliebe und Leben (Women’s Love and Life ; fig.

14). 39 Building on Meier-Graefe, Katherine Kuenzli describes the frieze as a “modern-day ‘Life of the Virgin,’” and a prime example of Denis’s synthesis of Symbolist painting and quattrocento fresco decoration.40 Each panel of the frieze depicts a series of important milestones in a religious woman’s life. Denis renders each scene with a perspectival format learned from Italian frescoes, distinctly delineating fore, middle, and background into separate vignettes. His broad fields of unmediated color and incorporation of ornamental patterning, decoration, and static figures reflect the formal attributes of Symbolism. The frieze, by combining the secular

38 Katherine Marie Kuenzli, The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin- de-Siècle (Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2010): 123.

39 Kuenzli, The Nabis and Intimate Modernism, 110.

40 Kuenzli, The Nabis and Intimate Modernism , 108.

modernism of domestic interior decoration with the Christian values and aesthetics of quattrocento fresco would have appealed to the “Latin taste” of Denis’s patrons.

Denis’s strategy of stylistic synthesis, later adopted by de Lempicka, was developed in conversation with fellow Symbolist artists Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903) and Vincent van Gogh

(1853 - 1890). Despite their shared anti-modernist appeal to tradition, regionalism, and spirituality, Gauguin and van Gogh are typically not seen as aesthetically conservative as Denis.

Their Symbolist experiments were influenced by widespread regional religious revivals that occurred in France in the 1880s. These revivals, a backlash against the Third Republic’s anti- clerical campaign and initiative to nationalize and systemize education, aimed to preserve the regional identity, customs, language, and devotional rituals of various provinces outside the

Parisian center. 41 Symbolists and Catholic conservatives alike were drawn to the supposed

“primitive,” rural, and unindustrialized authenticity of the regional religious revivals occurring in

Pont-Aven, Arles, and Brittany. Artists were drawn to the subject of the Catholic peasant, and especially the distinctive regional dress and Catholic rituals of Breton women, to express these qualities. The subject of Breton women, depicted in numerous Symbolist paintings including

Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) (1888, fig. 15) and Denis’s

The Breton Dance (1891, fig. 16), had strong religious connotations that enabled the Symbolists to explore a new modern style while still appealing to potential Catholic and conservative patrons.

41 Debora Silverman, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000): 49, 55; Marlais, “Maurice Denis in le Vesinet,” 126. The State’s campaign eventually resulted in the official separation of church and state in 1905, the enforcement of laws against Catholic education, and the shutdown of many religious schools and churches in France.

Denis’s oeuvre also encompassed an exploration of ambiguous subjects, including many that blur the lines between spiritual and secular themes, in ways that prefigured de Lempicka’s works of the 1930s. Denis’s oeuvre contains numerous inclusions of symbols, subjects, and motifs that have dual meanings or multiple possible connotations, one of the main attributes of

Symbolist art. For example, the first panel of Denis’s Frauenliebe und Leben is known as The

Communicants , and depicts young women dressed in white first communion gowns about to receive the holy sacrament. Communicants are a particularly interesting ambiguous subject because of their reference to both religious notions of purity and to the secular conceptions of coming of age and entering womanhood. Another example is his four-panel Screen with Doves

(1896, fig. 17), which depicts a woman carving her name into a tree upon the event of her betrothal. This motif of betrothal is found in other works by Denis, and can act as a signifier for both the woman’s spiritual union under god and for the beginning of her sexual life after marriage. 42 Another panel of this screen depicts two doves drinking together at a fountain. A white dove, within the art historical tradition, can be read alternatively as a symbol for both the

Holy Spirit and for the messenger of Aphrodite or Venus, the goddess of love. The dual-meaning dove is able to connote both purity and sexuality. Denis may have “intended to increase the ambiguity of the scene by erasing clear-cut distinction between sacred and profane,” effectively using indeterminate symbolism as an artistic strategy and marketing tool.43

Ultimately, much of Denis’s strategic conservatism was aimed at his primary patron,

Henry Lerolle, a devout Catholic and amateur artist. Lerolle was responsible for introducing

Denis to a wealthy elite circle of potential patrons. This circle was typically haute bourgeois, Old

42 Groom, Beyond the Easel , 107.

43 Groom, Beyond the Easel , 108.

French, and Catholic, with an appreciation for Denis’s cultivated “Latin taste.” 44 In the ideological climate of the Dreyfus Affair, “the circle of Denis and his conservative Catholic intellectuals around L’Action Francaise grew in influence.” 45 L’Action Francaise was a French far-right monarchist political journal founded in 1899 as a nationalist reaction against the left- wing support of Alfred Dreyfus. The journal promoted a policy of “integral nationalism,” and had an anti-Semitic, anti-Protestant, and anti-democratic agenda that was extremely influential during this period. 46 For Denis, being a member of this prominent right-wing circle, and implementing strategies to appeal to their artistic taste, was good for business.

While Denis’s politics and association with conservative social circles is well documented, the extent to which this impacted his art has been the topic of much disagreement.

Michael Marlais argues that Denis’s style and politics are inextricably linked, citing Denis’s decorations for the Sacred Heart Chapel in Le Vésinet (fig. 18) as a primary example. 47

Conversely, Gloria Groom has argued that Denis’s anti-Dreyfusard point of view was more about securing patrons and positive critical attention for the burgeoning Nabis than it was about promoting any personal radical right-wing politics in his art. 48 Regardless of Denis’s personal politics, his deliberate ambiguity made him a sought-after artist for both secular and church commissions. For example, in 1903 Denis received the commission to create decorations for two chapels in the above-mentioned Church of Sainte-Marguerite at Le Vesinet, the Sacred Heart

44 Groom, Beyond the Easel , 44.

45 Groom, Beyond the Easel , 157.

46 Ziolkowski, Classicism of the Twenties, 12.

47 Michael Marlais, “Conservative Style/Conservative Politics: Maurice Denis in le Vesinet,” Art History 16, no. 1 (March 1993): 125.

48 Groom, Beyond the Easel , 34.

Chapel and the Virgin Chapel. The choice of Denis for this commission was seen as a sign of progress, with the local press taking pride in securing an artistically progressive and sophisticated artist for the decorations. 49 The style of these church decorations matched the style

Denis used for his domestic interior commissions. Although traditional by today’s standards, this style was seen as radical for church decoration of his time. His artistic reconciliation of religious subjects and modernist painting, and ambiguous use of symbols, enabled him to appeal to the greatest number of potential buyers and patrons. Denis encouraged his patrons to see what they wanted in the work, regardless of his own possible intent or favored interpretation. 50

De Lempicka’s Appropriation of Conservative Strategies

De Lempicka was likely drawn to Denis’s successful navigation of religiously conservative markets and would have seen his approach as a useful model. Denis’s “Définition du Néo-traditionnisme,” and his mission modernize Classicism, set the stage for de Lempicka’s own synthesis of avant-garde modernist styles with classicizing and pious subjects. Although her style is often described as Art Deco, this classification is too simplistic for the breadth of styles de Lempicka looked to for inspiration. She developed a modernist, idiosyncratic style that merged figuration with highly stylized geometric and volumetric form. While her sleek, polished, and machine-like style may seem at odds with her traditional subject matter of religious types and peasants, in the context of her studies under Denis, this approach takes on more significant meaning and deliberate intent. Just as Denis had synthesized Symbolist painting and

49 Marlais, “Maurice Denis in le Vesinet,” 127.

50 Groom, Beyond the Easel, 53.

quattrocento fresco decoration, de Lempicka combined a Cubist and Art Deco-inspired modernism with Italian Renaissance and Baroque classical traditions.

De Lempicka’s synthetic style can be seen at the core of her works from the 1920s through the end of the 1930s and is particularly apparent in La Polonaise . This painting depicts a three-quarter view of a young girl in an unidentifiable setting, a composition that draws attention to the figure’s face and hands. The girl delicately holds a book with cylindrically shaped hands, while machine-like ribbons of blonde hair and a traditional draped peasant shawl frame her soft, round, angelic face. The geometric and volumetric nature of the girl’s features are clearly based in Cubist and Futurist ideals, recalling the “Tubism” of Fernand Léger’s (1881 - 1955) early machinist works.51 However, the modest way in which the shawl covers her face, and the slender, elongated quality of her fingers, are also comparable to passages in works by Italian mannerist artists, such as Jacopo da Pontormo’s (1494 - 1557) Portrait of Maria Salviati de'

Medici and Giulia de' Medici (c.1539, fig. 19), where similar approaches are evident. De

Lempicka made regular trips to Italy throughout her life to visit museums and make studies of both paintings and sculptures in situ. During the 1930s, she was so deeply involved with studying Italian art that she has since been called “a modern mannerist.”52 This title accurately reflects the synthetic quality of works in de Lempicka’s oeuvre. La Polonaise , and other works from this period, combine influences from modern and renaissance sources, finding the similarities between them and merging them together to create a new idiosyncratic style. This

51 Michèle Lefrancois, “Evangelist and Robot Woman,” in Lempicka , English-language ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 2006): 76-97. “Tubism” was originally a derisive term applied to Léger’s style by the critic Louis Vauxcelles. As a note, Léger was one of the artists who, like de Lempicka, participated in the “return to order.” His style of painting in the 1920s strongly resembles de Lempicka’s paintings discussed in this thesis. A comparison of their works would offer am exciting avenue of inquiry and research.

52 Jean-Marc Irollo, “A Modern Mannerist,” in Lempicka , English-Language edition, (Paris: Flammarion, 2006).

synthetic approach takes inspiration from Denis as a way to simultaneously cater to the stylistic preferences of both avant-garde and conservative markets.

De Lempicka, by appropriating the subjects and content of Denis, modified a visual language already proven successful at navigating a period of Catholic revival. This is evident in her Breton Girl (1934, fig. 20), a painting that is in clear conversation with Symbolist regional religious revival themes. De Lempicka used the moral and nationalistic connotations artists like

Denis had attached to the subject of the Breton peasant to appeal to the climate of her current context. She reframed the symbolic associations of the Breton woman to establish a dialog with the devotees of the widespread Catholic revival of the 1930s. Unlike the earlier regional religious revivals of the 1880s, the 1930s saw this religious movement take hold in the French capital and gain more widespread support. De Lempicka capitalized on this development by appropriating the image of a Breton peasant for her own oeuvre. De Lempicka’s Breton Girl , like La

Polonaise , uses a cropped head and shoulders composition that focuses the viewer’s eye on the face and dress of the figure. This compositional arrangement and the artist’s painstaking attention to material detail emphasizes the girl’s velvety black dress and her elaborate, white lace shoulder pads and headdress. This style of regional dress, typically worn during festivals and religious events, was commonly understood in the 1930s to be a quintessentially Breton costume, thereby clearly signifying the figure’s ethnic and religious identity. She is undeniably a rural

French-Catholic peasant. Her piety, regional identity, and French nationality would have made her a favored subject during this period.

Another of de Lempicka’s depictions of young women, The Communicant (1928), brings together two of Denis’s most commonly used symbols, the communicant and the dove. She uses the multivalent meanings of these motifs to heighten the duality of the spiritual and the sexual in

her depiction of the Catholic initiate. In the painting, a white dove is depicted holding a corner of a young communicant’s modest white robes in its beak. The dove could be read as adding another layer of cloth to cover the girl and secure her modesty. However, due to the indeterminate movement of the dove’s head and direction of flight, this act could equally be interpreted as one of unveiling, which would suggest that the dove signifies Venus and sexuality, rather than the Holy Spirit. 53 The potential for double meaning was not lost on contemporary viewers of the painting. For example, Fernand Vallon in his 1930 article on de Lempicka for La

Revue du Médecin , maliciously noted this: “Mais une colombe, insidieuse messagère de Vénus, exquise et diabolique contrefaçon du Saint-Esprit, soulève du bec un coin du voile” (But a dove, insidious messenger of Venus, exquisite and devilish counterfeit of the Holy Spirit, lifts a corner of the veil). 54 He referred to the dove as a counterfeit Holy Spirit, an insidious messenger of

Venus soon to replace the presence of God in the innocent girl’s heart. As Vallon’s interpretation suggests, despite the initial pious appearance of a modestly dressed young girl about to embark on a Catholic rite of passage, the ambiguity of the dove’s symbology created an erotic and transgressive subtext to the meaning of The Communicant .

De Lempicka became financially successful by effectively implementing Denis’s brand of conservatism. Her traditional and religious appearing works of the late 1920s and 1930s were especially lucrative, with Claridge going so far as to claim “1933 was Tamara’s most successful

53 Two years later, in 1931, de Lempicka would paint Woman with Dove (fig. 21), in which the dove is undeniably a symbol of Venus. Although wearing the same swooning expression as the communicant, unlike the modestly dressed young girl, this woman is depicted in the nude. Clutching the dove to her breast, she has a more sexually mature air about her.

54 Fernand Vallon, “Chez Tamara de Lempicka,” in La Revue du Médecin , May 1930, 32-33. “C'est pur, pur… Mais une colombe, insidieuse messagère de Vénus, exquise et diabolique contrefa çon du Saint-Esprit, soulève du bec un coin du voile. Elle promet à sa ma îtresse, après le fugitif passage de Dieu dans ce petit coeur tout prêt à déborder, les belles lèvres d'amour de la femme-enfant.”

year to date.” 55 Her success during this period is particularly significant given that the rest of the country was still struggling through the economic depression caused by the 1929 crash. After losing the elite portrait commissions that had been the foundation of her financial stability, de

Lempicka created an alternative market for her work with a new approach to painting. De

Lempicka’s and Denis’s shared interest in pursuing a stylistic synthesis between modernism and tradition, depicting Catholic and conservative subjects, and cultivating ambiguity between the spiritual and the sexual through their art was not simply a result of these artists’ personal piety or political beliefs. These were schemes cleverly crafted to attract the widest potential patronage from their conservative, Catholic, and nationalistic leaning communities. Both artists were extremely successful in this approach.

Although I have outlined in this section the similarities in style and content that de

Lempicka and Denis’s oeuvres shared, and how de Lempicka modelled her approach on Denis, it is important to recognize some key differences between the two artists’ uses of conservative strategies. While Denis’s approach to painting was strongly linked to his conservative politics, there is no evidence that de Lempicka was politically motivated in the same way. Her politics are largely unknown, making it evident that she did not wish her work to be associated with a given political position. In addition, although the two artists were working in similarly conservative contexts, their different identities, cultural backgrounds, and standing in the Parisian art community impacted the nature of their implementations of these strategies. Denis was a male,

French artist, who held a position of power as the leader of an artist group and a teacher. He also had valuable connections to wealthy, conservative social circles and elite, religious establishments in Paris. While de Lempicka did have her own connections to artistic

55 Claridge, Tamara de Lempicka, 190.

communities and celebrity circles in Paris, these were relationships she obtained only after coming to France as a refugee with no prior artistic experience or contacts. Due to her outsider status and gender, the positions of power and social networks Denis held were not as easily obtainable for de Lempicka. Her use of conservative strategies, unlike Denis’s, was motivated out of necessity to cope with the greater challenges posed to her professional success. It is this important distinction between the artists that reveals de Lempicka’s diversion from Denis.

The FAM and the “Polish Invasion”

Through her membership in the FAM and the relationships she fostered with émigré artist communities of Paris, de Lempicka surreptitiously accommodated more transgressive elements in her seemingly conservative paintings. De Lempicka was likely drawn to the FAM because of its successful negotiation of the fraught conservative climate of the 1930s. Her devotion to the organization surpassed her participation in any other group. This preference is evident in her decision to only exhibit her work in the annual FAM exhibitions, and no other salons, between 1934 and 1938. 56 In addition, she shared with her fellow FAM artists the impulse to challenge normative ideologies and French values in their work. De Lempicka took direction from her contemporaries, using subjects with nationalistic and conventionally Catholic connotations, to hide underlying meanings in her paintings. These traditional subjects acted as a mask of conformity, allowing de Lempicka and her peers to explore outsider ethnicities, alternative gender roles, and immoral eroticism in their art without risking their professional careers. Conservative strategies disguised not only the subversive subtexts of their works, but

56 Mori, The Queen of Modern , 49. The reasoning behind de Lempicka’s decision to stop exhibiting in other salons after 1934 is unknown. However, it is possible that this choice was a consequence of either the economic depression, her faith in only the FAM to effectively exhibit and sell her work, or a combination of the two.

also distracted from any unfavorable attention potentially caused by their non-French, female identities. Such tactics were necessary in the early twentieth century, as women artists constantly had to professionally reinvent themselves and their work in order to be taken seriously. 57

Unfortunately, the decisions made by de Lempicka and the FAM to navigate and succeed within their conservative environment have contributed to their marginalization from the art historical canon today. 58

De Lempicka and her FAM peers relied upon similar traditional subjects, including the peasant, motherhood, and religious types, in their strategic approaches to painting. These are subjects de Lempicka represented throughout her oeuvre, showing she was clearly involved in similar interests to her FAM contemporaries. The subject of maternity was particularly significant in the 1930s, given its connections to nationalistic rhetoric and Catholic values.

Images of motherhood connoted religious themes, such as the Madonna and Child, as well as nationalist themes, such as the duty placed on women to have children. In the interwar period, women’s domestic and familial duties were “promoted as an essential component of the return to order and its promise of social and economic prosperity” following the First World War. 59

Motherhood was politicized and promoted by the French state as a remedy to both the crisis of depopulation, caused by the mass loss of life during the war, and anxieties about women’s increasing presence in the workforce. Therefore, the subject of motherhood would have been seen primarily as a subject which upheld conservative ideals and an easy image on which to project nationalistic messages.

57 Birnbaum, “Framing Femininities,” 19.

58 Birnbaum, “Framing Femininities,” 9.

59 Birnbaum, “Framing Femininities,” 17.

De Lempicka and numerous other members of the FAM exhibited paintings on the subject of maternity, to an overwhelmingly positive critical reception. Many of their images were appropriated by right-wing critics to endorse family-oriented Catholic values and French nationalist agendas. However, such critics often ignored or overlooked the fact that many of these foreign depictions of maternity complicated traditional understandings of the subject. 60 For example, Polish-Jewish artist Mela Muter (1876 - 1967), in her Mother and Child with Haloes

(1916, fig. 22), calls into question Catholic and nationalistic iconography of the Madonna by emphasizing the plight of impoverished women and the psychological and physical toll of motherhood. 61 The FAM also posthumously exhibited the works of artists such as María

Blanchard (1881 - 1932) and her 1925 Maternity (fig. 23). Blanchard’s painting presents an unidealized version of the subject by emphasizing the mother’s swollen feet and dejected facial expression. Blanchard repeatedly turned to the subject of maternity before her death in 1932, and her identity as a foreign, Spanish-Polish woman who was unable to have children puts a unique spin on the traditionally positive image. 62

Coalescing the strategies of Denis and her FAM contemporaries, de Lempicka’s 1928

Maternity uses a subject with traditionally conservative connotations to explore subversive ideas.

This composition strongly resembles Denis’s 1895 Maternity with Lace Cuff : both paintings employ a similar placement of the mother’s hands and angle of the head as she breastfeeds her swaddled child. However, while Denis presents an unquestionably favorable, tender, and traditional representation of motherhood, the meaning of de Lempicka’s painting is more open to

60 Paula Birnbaum, “Femmes Artistes Modernes: Women, Art, and Modern Identity in Interwar France,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Bryn Mawr College, 1996): 358.

61 Birnbaum, “Femmes Artistes Modernes,” 404.

62 Birnbaum, “Femmes Artistes Modernes,” 413.

interpretation. While the plump, rosy cheeks of the infant in de Lempicka’s Maternity convey the sense of a content and healthy child, the rendering of the mother herself offers a multivalent reading of the painting as a whole. The mother’s eyes are distant, and her face is devoid of clear expression. De Lempicka’s rendering of her visage allows for the conflicting readings of both calm serenity and emotional detachment. Although the mother’s hands elegantly cradle the infant, her bent, abnormally elongated fingers resemble claws, thereby undermining the traditional softness associated with a mother’s touch. The sleek, angular style and metallic sheen of the painting makes the scene feel uncomfortable and gives the mother’s act of nursing a mechanical quality. This contrasts with the romantic, flowered ruffles of the baby’s blanket and the pink tones of the color palette, which suggest a warmer and more comforting sentiment. By juxtaposing mechanical, emotional coldness and traditional, motherly warmth in her depiction of maternity, de Lempicka’s atypical representation of motherhood challenges a singular positive, nationalistic, or Christian reading. 63

Most of the artists in the FAM were émigrés; many, including de Lempicka, were Polish.

She was part of a “Polish invasion” of Paris between the years 1890 and 1918, when more than

600 Polish artists travelled to the French capital.64 The influx of Polish artist émigrés to Paris was accompanied by a broader migration of individuals from Eastern Europe and elsewhere to

France after the First World War. In part, this migration was encouraged and driven by the

63 By her very nature, de Lempicka did not fall neatly into the State’s and Church’s model for the ideal woman as wife and mother. The ideal was inherently opposed to the notion of women becoming artists, and it is clear that although de Lempicka did have a daughter, and two husbands over the course of her life, she always put her art and career over family. De Lempicka-Foxhall, Passion by Design .

64 Ewa Bobrowska, “Expatriate Communities: Polish Artists in Paris, 1890-1914: Between International Modernity and National Identity,” in Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914: Strangers in Paradise , Ed. Karen L. Carter and Susan Waller (Farnham Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2015): 85.

French state’s desperation to repopulate after the war’s devastating death toll. 65 Foreign residents in Paris made up almost ten percent of the total population by 1931. In Montparnasse, where de

Lempicka lived, the concentrations were much higher. 66 However, the influx of foreigners to

Paris was not always met with open arms by the French public. They encountered rising nationalism, increasing antagonism, and widespread xenophobia, especially towards Jews. 67

Despite these conditions, many foreign artists, including de Lempicka, stayed in Paris through the 1930s. For many Polish artists, Paris was a kind of refuge from the strife and revolutions that came with the partitions of Poland. The partitions were a series of divisions lasting until 1918, in which the land of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was divided between surrounding European empires. 68 This situation also made it difficult for Poles travelling to France to secure proper identification papers and therefore opportunities for academic artistic training. The Académies Julian, la Grande Chaumiere, and Ranson became popular with Polish artists because they were free and did not have formal registration requirements, which were often difficult for Poles to satisfy due to the partitions. 69 De Lempicka attended two of these immigrant-friendly Académies herself, and her work resembles that of her

Polish peers. In addition to academic connections to her Polish artistic milieu, de Lempicka also traveled to Poland numerous times in the 1920s, and exhibited her work to a positive reception in

65 Karen L. Carter and Susan Waller, Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914: Strangers in Paradise (Farnham Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2015): 19.

66 Green, Art in France, 61.

67 Green, Art in France, 228.

68 Bobrowska, “Expatriate Communities,” 85. This refers to the series of partitions of Poland, the third a final of which occurred in 1795. The final partition divided the land of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between Prussia, the Austrian Empire, and the Russian Empire. This partition lasted until 1918. De Lempicka was originally from the Russian partition of Poland.

69 Bobrowska, “Expatriate Communities,” 85.

Poland. She showed her work as part of the Polish section of numerous Paris exhibitions, making her a representative of Polish art in Paris. She exhibited The Communicant in the 1929 exhibition

Cercle des Artistes Polonaise a Paris (the Circle of Polish Artists in Paris); in 1929, she was invited to participate in the Poznan exhibition; and in 1929 and 1931 she showed in the Polish section at the Carnegie institute in Pittsburgh. 70

For de Lempicka, drawing inspiration from her Polish contemporaries was a way for her to firmly place herself within the Polish avant-garde in Paris, while also overcoming the obstacles to foreigners’ artistic success. Her work shows direct compositional inspiration from other Polish artists, revealing her engagement with their work, and strategies, as a model for her own. For example, Nowakowska-Sito suggests that de Lempicka’s At the Window (1932, fig.

24), which depicts a young girl, may have referenced Boy at the Window (1930, fig. 25) by Zofia

Stryjeńska (1891 - 1976).71 Both paintings depict a child in front of an open window, each with a potted plant before them. However, while Stryjeńska’s painting draws from folkloric references in both style and content, de Lempicka’s work uses her signature geometric style, evident in the machine-like coils of the girl’s hair. Beyond compositional similarities, de Lempicka’s shared

Stryjeńska’s interest in subversion, particularly through the act of merging eroticism and classical tradition. As a professionally successful female Polish artist with likeminded interests, she could have been a role model for de Lempicka. Stryjeńska was awarded the Legion d’Honneur and four Grand Prix for the Polish Pavilion at the Decorative Arts Exhibition held in

70 Mori, The Queen of Modern , 26.

71 Nowakowska-Sito, “Tamara de Lempicka and Poland,” 68.

Paris in 1925. 72 By referencing the work of her successful Polish contemporaries, such as

Stryjeńska, de Lempicka found an avenue through which to achieve success as an émigré artist.

Despite the artistic achievements of some foreigners in Paris, they were often perceived as separate from their French counterparts. The rising number of foreign artists in Paris came to be associated with the “Ecole de Paris,” or the School of Paris; the term, coined by Andre

Warnod in 1925 to describe the art of immigrant artists, was designed to differentiate them from native-born French artists. 73 This “school” was in no way a defined movement or set group of artists; rather, its originating definition implied a loose affiliation of foreign artists working in

Paris in the interwar years. 74 However, in the scholarship on the School of Paris, there are a few male artists, namely Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973), Amedeo Modigliani (1884 - 1920), Chaim

Soutine (1893 - 1943), Moïse Kisling (1891 - 1953), and Marc Chagall (1887 - 1985), who receive the most critical attention. De Lempicka and most other female artists are more often than not omitted from scholarship on the School of Paris, despite the fact that they actively engaged with similar themes, subjects, and styles employed by their male immigrant artist contemporaries.

72 Nowakowska-Sito, “Tamara de Lempicka and Poland,” 68.

73 Carter and Waller, Strangers in Paradise , 19.

74 Stanley Meisler, Shocking Paris: Soutine, Chagall and the Outsiders of Montparnasse (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 81. “Most attempts at definition since Warnod have only added more confusion” to the term School of Paris. “It makes more sense to think of the School of Paris as a historical phenomenon – an unprecedented and unexpected migration of young artists, mostly Jewish, many from the Russian empire, to Paris in the early decades of the twentieth century.” De Lempicka may be left out of discussions on the circle of Montparnasse and the School of Paris, despite her direct affiliations, due to her gender as well as her non-Jewish identity; This is especially interesting because de Lempicka may have been partly Jewish on her father’s side, given that her father’s name Gurwik was a Russian Jewish name. De Lempicka tried to hide this fact, her “reticence on this particular subject, at least, is understandable. Russia was deeply anti-Semitic; a special permit had to be granted for a Jew even to live in St. Petersburg.” Claridge, Tamara de Lempicka , 15.

De Lempicka would have seen the work of other School of Paris artists on view at the

Café Rotonde, a social hub of Montparnasse where “artists, writers and composers gathered … to exchange ideas or meet newcomers to Paris.” 75 Like de Lempicka, Modigliani and Soutine were interested in fashioning a new kind of portraiture, and although these artists’ oeuvre took very different avenues, they all represented the subject in non-realistic or non-naturalistic ways. This interest in portraiture was one of the dominant ways the School of Paris set itself apart from the contemporary Parisian avant-garde which was moving further into pure abstraction. 76 Each of these three artists developed a kind of signature portrait type that came to define their oeuvres.

Similar to the program of the FAM, the School of Paris’s shared reliance on figuration linked them to the trends of the “return to order,” often helping them overcome the barriers to their success caused by their foreign origins.

The work of these émigrés often addressed themes of nationalism and identity through portraiture and genre pictures, particularly of the subject of the peasant. The body of the peasant, as much as the subject of maternity, was a common site for the projection of nationalist and

French ideals during this period. This nationalist ideal was closely linked to the regionalist idea that one’s identity and place in the world was based on where one was born, one’s homeland. 77

The traditional rural peasant had a long artistic history of being used as a symbol of the nation of

France. For example, Marianne, a character who had embodied the French nation and the ideal of liberty since the French Revolution in the late 18 th century, was equated with a peasant woman in

75 Meisler, Shocking Paris, 21.

76 Meisler, Shocking Paris, 85.

77 Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995): 40.

the 1930s by radical senator Jean Durand. 78 For foreign artists, depicting a deliberately non-

French peasant would have had political connotations during this period.

De Lempicka’s La Polonaise , a serene image of a Polish peasant girl, is one such work that simultaneously mobilizes and reframes the traditional associations of the subject. The girl’s foreign identity is signified by the title of the painting, which translates to “the Polish girl,” and visually reinforced by the white shawl modestly covering her head. The shawl’s embroidered pattern of red flowers is quintessentially Polish in style and craft, and its colors mirror those of the Polish flag. 79 De Lempicka, by depicting the traditional subject of the peasant, appeared to conform to conservative trends. However, La Polonaise is a peasant who clearly falls outside of the French ideal. She represents a foreign “other” and could be interpreted as a stand-in for the large immigrant populations of Paris at the time. In this way, the work upsets the French state’s and the art world’s traditional appropriation of the peasant as a symbol of French nationalism.

The use of costume to signify identity and ethnicity was a strategy commonly used by de

Lempicka’s émigré contemporaries to give their works nationalistic meaning. For instance, de

Lempicka’s Polish compatriot Moïse Kisling similarly uses both title and visual clues to signify national identity in his painting Woman in a Polish Shawl (1928, fig. 26). By redefining the connotations of the subject of the peasant within a period of rising nationalism in France, both

Kisling and de Lempicka effectively challenged the anti-immigrant, right-wing rhetoric of the era. Interestingly, Kisling’s Woman in a Polish Shawl , despite its non-French nationalistic

78 Green, Art in France, 229. This idea was vocalized when “speaking at the funeral of the radical senator Jean Durand in 1936, [Albert Sarrut] quoted approvingly from Durand: “when I want to picture the republic for myself in my dreams, I see her as a beautiful peasant woman from home….”

79 The coat of arms of Poland, a white eagle on a red shield, first appeared in the 13 th century. The same pattern was revived after World War I by many Polish nationalist organizations. The red flag with a white eagle was officially replaced by the Sejm after Poland regained independence and adopted a simplified design of a horizontal bicolor of white over red as their national flag on August 1, 1919.

connotations, was bought by the French state in 1934. 80 While the specific reasoning behind the purchase is unknown, the occurrence illustrates the success of these artists’ strategies, which enabled them to explore their artistic commitments while simultaneously accommodating societal expectations, governmental ideologies, and market desires. 81

As this chapter has shown, de Lempicka was actively engaged with the subjects, themes, and tactics used by her contemporaries. Her works of the late 1920s and 1930s did not simply express her personal struggles and beliefs without regard for her socioreligious context. De

Lempicka looked to Denis, the FAM, and her Polish colleagues for ways to effectively navigate a climate of rising nationalism and religious fervor. Denis’s artistic synthesis of modernism and classical tradition, his representation of subjects that appealed to the “Latin taste,” and his deliberate mobilization of ambiguity between the spiritual and the sexual in his works all acted as a model for de Lempicka’s own strategic conservatism. Furthermore, de Lempicka’s membership with the FAM gave her a platform on which to negotiate her own transgressive artistic goals and overcome the challenges posed to her as a female, émigré artist. Her interest in similar themes and subjects as her FAM, School of Paris, and Polish avant-garde milieu provided the artist with guidelines for how to gain artistic acclaim in a contentious environment. The unique and complex relationship of de Lempicka’s oeuvre with the broader trends of her artistic community provided the foundation for her successful navigation of the conservative norms of the period to continue to explore her own subversive artistic interests.

80 Mori, The Queen of Modern , 360.

81 Albert Boime, Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848-1871 (United Kingdom: University of Chicago Press, 2008): 16. It is possible that the French government acquired Kisling’s work in order to keep it out of public circulation and view. This hypothesis is founded in the French State’s long history of buying political or subversive works, such as Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830, fig. 27), in order to hide their revolutionary or nationally problematic messages from the public.

CHAPTER 2

SUBVERTING THE “RETURN TO ORDER”

Building on the previous analysis of de Lempicka’s strategic conservatism, this chapter argues that the artist deployed conservative subject matter in works produced in the 1930s to stake a claim in the “return to order” Parisian avant-garde. 82 The “return to order” was a conservative political and cultural phenomenon closely linked to French nationalism, bolstered by Catholic values, and often represented by the figure of the provincial or Catholic peasant. 83

De Lempicka’s participation in this influential and broadly appropriated trend reveals the intellectual and strategic motivations behind her work, thereby offering an alternative to the biographical readings that dominate the scholarship on the artist.84 However, de Lempicka’s engagement with the “return to order” was anything but straightforward. Although paintings such as La Polonaise and The Communicant appear to present pious exteriors that stylistically, thematically, and theoretically conform to the conservative program of the “return to order,” they in fact manifest de Lempicka’s interests in the erotic. I argue that de Lempicka blurred the lines between erotic and spiritual ecstasy in her paintings, thereby transgressing the nationalistic and religious ethos of the period.

82 While many of de Lempicka’s works from 1928-1937, could be described at first glance as religious or conservative, these were not the only ones made during these years in focus. As I will later address, erotic works, nudes, and modern portrait types still pepper this period of the artists oeuvre. However, religious and conservative types dominate her artistic output.

83 Jean Cocteau, A Call to Order: written between the years 1918 and 1926 and including Cock and harlequin, Professional secrets, and other critical essays, trans. from the French by Rollo H. Myers (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1974). This was not a definitive artistic movement, rather a loosely defined phenomena or artistic theory.

84 Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, 77. Due to de Lempicka’s figuration and classical interests being interpreted differently from male artists, she is not featured in any existing discussion of the “return to order.”

The “Return to Order”

The “return to order” was a cultural aesthetic phenomenon that manifested predominantly in France and Italy; emerging during the First World War, the movement hit its stride in the immediate post-war reconstruction years, and continued well into the 1930s. Known variously as

“interwar Classicism,” “the classical revival,” “rappel à l’ordre,” the “call to order,” and the

“return to representation,” this artistic impulse was first noted, theorized, and critiqued by André

Lhote in 1919. Later in 1926, the phrase was used by poet Jean Cocteau (1889 - 1963) as the title for a book of essays. Cocteau, an influential writer and acquaintance of the avant-garde’s leading members, helped establish the ideology of the “return to order.” Another key figure of the

“return to order,” and one who emphasized its religious and moral implications, was André

Gide. 85 Lhote, Cocteau, and Gide were known associates of de Lempicka, and her understanding and use of the “return to order” was likely directly influenced by their promotions of it. 86

In essence, the “return to order,” as loosely defined by these influential figures, embodied an artistic impulse to return to the timeless ideals, stability, and order offered by classical antiquity, filtered through the art of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods. The widespread disruption and disorder following World War I sparked a need for greater clarity and

85 Ziolkowski, Classicism of the Twenties , 53. “In 1921, André Gide, responding to an inquiry from the journal La Renaissance regarding his views on Classicism, began by maintaining – perhaps unaware of developments in Italy - that such a question could be comprehended only in France. True Classicism, he argued, results not from exterior constraints, but from moral qualities: “I consider Classicism as a harmonious sheaf of virtues, of which the first is modesty;”” Mori, The Queen of Modern , 158. After a falling out between Gide and Cocteau brought about by accusations of plagiarism, Cocteau outed Gide as a homosexual to the press. Cocteau divulged Gide’s apparent “discreet raptures,” calling him both “Pasteur et bacchante.” This metaphor exemplifies Gide’s interest in the potential to reconcile devout morality with transgressive sexual behavior, similar to de Lempicka’s ideas about the relationship between the religious and the erotic evident in her work.

86 Mori, The Queen of Modern , 156. De Lempicka made the acquaintance of numerous Parisian literary figures, including Jean Cocteau and André Gide, through the salon of her friend Nathalie Barney. She would have also known Gide through Denis, as he and Gide were life-long friends and artistic collaborators. She knew André Lhote from her studies under him.

rationality, in both life and art. 87 In France, the political agenda of the classical revival was aimed at repressing national trauma through a collective drive towards reconstruction and was

“felt to be the essential restorative for spirits infected and weakened by the war.” 88 As Romy

Golan notes, “exacerbated by the disenchantment with technology that accompanied the great depression… the turn to the rural and, in more general terms, to the organic became ever more pervasive in French art during the 1930s.” 89 As artists became disillusioned with the promise of modernity and technological progress after witnessing its devastating effects during the war, they nostalgically turned towards the values of order and reason that they felt was embodied in past traditions. The classical revival was also linked to a repudiation of avant-garde styles in this period. Abstraction, previously tied to the glorification of modernity, became associated with a variety of social, political, and cultural ills. As a result, abstraction was abandoned in favor of a return to figuration and more recognizable subjects. The “return to order” was often expressed through traditional subjects such as the figure composition and the nude, with maternity and peasant life noted as favored subjects among the artists, including Picasso, Le Corbusier (1887 -

1965), and de Lempicka, who participated in this turn. 90

Followers of this “return to order” ideology insisted on utilizing artistic tradition as a source for innovation, as opposed to academic Classicism, which involved the act of imitation. 91

Elizabeth Cowling goes so far as to credit the “return to order” with restoring to Classicism the

87 Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910-1930 (London: Tate Gallery, 1990): 12.

88 Ziolkowski, Classicism of the Twenties , 50.

89 Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, ix.

90 Cowling and Mundy, On Classic Ground, 12-13.

91 Cowling and Mundy, On Classic Ground, 20-21.

“inexhaustible creative variety” and “inherent ambiguity that had been drained out of it” through its imitation by academic artists. 92 This desire to restore Classicism is evident in the writings of one of the phenomenon’s primary promoters, Jean Cocteau. In his 1926 essay “Rappel à l’ordre,”

Cocteau urges artists not to fall into the trap of being “modern” by simply depicting new technologies in their work or by trying to replicate a specific stylistic “ism.” 93 Although Cocteau encourages a turn to the art of the past as an alternative, he does so with a very important caveat.

He argues that it is pointless for artists to simply “hark back to things that were young long ago, and copy them, adding just a dash of ‘to-day’ in order to justify themselves.” 94 He instead advocates for interpreting and experiencing the modern world through the eyes and ideals of a classicist, an aim de Lempicka took up in her own oeuvre. 95

Perhaps surprisingly, Picasso, according to Cocteau, was the artist to most successfully adopt a classicizing “return to order” style without rejecting modernism. 96 Picasso’s abrupt move from abstruse analytic styles to a “return to order” refinement and purification of the human form, inspired by the geometric proportionality of classical sculpture, paralleled de Lempicka’s own “return to order” turn in numerous ways. Picasso’s neoclassical period is generally dated from 1917 to 1925, beginning after his visit to the Farnese collection of Greek and Roman

92 Cowling and Mundy, On Classic Ground, 28.

93 Cocteau, A Call to Order , 123.

94 Cocteau, A Call to Order , 124.

95 Jean Cocteau and Wallace Fowlie, The Journals of Jean Cocteau , Edited and translated by Wallace Fowlie (New York: Criterion Books, 1956): 98.

96 Ziolkowski, Classicism of the Twenties , 131-32. Cocteau “actively pursued everyone of cultural significance and never saw a bandwagon onto which he could resist jumping. A fervent Picasso groupie – although the artist, disdainful of his pretentiousness, treated Cocteau as a whipping boy” – had an early awareness of the turn to classicism of Picasso; Cocteau and Fowlie, The Journals, 94. Cocteau refers to Picasso as the “Spaniard endowed with the oldest French recipes.”

sculpture in the Museo Nazionale in Rome in 1917. In particular, Ziolkowski makes a biographically inspired argument that the gigantism of the Farnese Hercules (fig. 28) caused

Picasso to feel “challenged to match or even outdo those antique masterpieces.” 97 While

Picasso’s specific personal motivations are not known, the stocky, volumetric forms, classical robes, and classical palette of the women depicted in his Three Women at the Spring (1921, fig.

29) certainly appear to reference, if not challenge, classical Greek sculpture. His Head of a

Woman (fig. 30), also from 1921, by providing a cropped image of the head of the woman on the left in Three Women at the Spring , shows in greater detail the tendency toward simplification and idealization of form. 98 This is evident in the near perfect oval of the woman’s head, the rectangular bridge of her nose, her spherical chin, and her symmetrically arched brows.

According to Kenneth Silver, Picasso was “the best and most unabashed neoclassicist” of the “return to order” era. 99 However, Silver neglects to acknowledge that Picasso never fully abandoned Cubism for the “return to order.” He did not see the two styles as incompatible and allowed them to coexist in this period of his work. Picasso’s engagement with the “return to order,” through his volumetric, geometrically distilled representations of the human figure, strongly resembles de Lempicka’s stylized portraits of women, such as La Polonaise . Both artists conflated influences from the classicizing tradition with contemporary modernism to create timeless, refined, yet ambiguous images of women that resisted singular stylistic classification.

Beyond influencing the directions of individual artists’ oeuvres, the “return to order” spirit infiltrated the avant-garde and motivated numerous artistic groups and movements

97 Ziolkowski, Classicism of the Twenties , 95.

98 Cowling and Mundy, On Classic Ground , 213.

99 Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914- 1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989): 271.

throughout Europe, such as Purism in France. Led by the artist Amédée Ozenfant (1886 - 1966) and architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (a.k.a. Le Corbusier), the Purists advocated in their

1918 manifesto entitled Après le Cubisme (After Cubism) for a rejection of Cubism. 100 They interpreted the illegible visual fragmentation and intellectual complexity of Cubism as excessively decadent. They associated Cubism with the immorality and individualistic elitism that had defined the pre-war period, which many believed led France into wartime. In addition, they critiqued Cubism for its decorative and ornamental qualities, deriding it as “the troubled art of a troubled era.” 101 As an alternative, the Purists promoted artistic “purity” of composition and style, which formally embraced the principles of unity, reserve, simplicity, and rationality. As Le

Corbusier’s Still Life (1920, fig. 31) exemplifies, the Purists often used motifs commonly found in Analytical Cubist paintings, such as still lifes with guitars and bottles. However, Le

Corbusier’s Still Life refines the image, making whole again the fragmented picture of the

Cubists and purifying it by eliminating extraneous detail, such as labels and logos. Their post- war manifesto for a new French art of Purism stated that “now that the war is over, all is being organized, clarified, and purified.” 102 This vision for a reorganized and civilized post-war French art paralleled the reconstruction program of the French government. Both desired to use the post- war collective drive to rebuild to construct an improved French society and avant-garde.

This patriotic promotion of collective national improvement and rejection of the individualistic radicalism of Cubism is often cited by art historians as evidence of the inherent conservatism of the “return to order.” For example, Benjamin Buchloh’s “Figures of Authority”

100 Carol S. Eliel, Françoise Ducros, and Tag Gronberg, L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925 (Los Angeles, Calif: Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with Harry N. Abrams, 2001): 11.

101 Eliel et al, L’Esprit Nouveau , 19.

102 Ziolkowski, Classicism of the Twenties , 47.

equates the figuration and classicizing quality of the work of “return to order” artists with conservative politics. In addition, the promotion of the themes of order and universality by

“return to order” advocates were usually met with approval by the political and social establishment of its own time.103 Bourgeois patrons, right-wing politicians, and critics of avant- gardism tended to favor the art of the “return to order,” causing the movement to be associated with political conservatism.104 Furthermore, the use of “return to order” ideology and language to promote the agenda of Fascism exacerbated the tendency to equate the classical revivalist style with reactionary politics.105 The “return to order” call for an artistic purity of line, based in the tradition of classical antiquity, was easily commandeered by right-wing politicians to bolster desires for a “racial purity” in art. 106 Because of these associations and appropriations, art historians such as Buchloh scorn the “return to order” for reaping the benefits of an increasingly authoritarian cultural climate and participating in the perpetuation of dangerous ideologies. 107

While such arguments are understandable, they neglect to acknowledge the nuanced approaches of “return to order” artists such as de Lempicka. By condemning the entire “return to order,” scholars perpetuate the notion that only art which radically opposes given political conditions is worthwhile. Such elitist views also contribute to the belief that all figurative works are inherently conservative.

103 Cowling and Mundy, On Classic Ground, 11.

104 Cowling and Mundy, On Classic Ground, 11; Ziolkowski, Classicism of the Twenties , 10.

105 Ziolkowski, Classicism of the Twenties , 54. In Italy, this was exemplified by a 1928 collection of essays, entitled The Circumnavigation of Art – The Call to Order , written by the painter-novelist Ardengo Soffici, an early spokesman of Fascism.

106 Cowling and Mundy, On Classic Ground, 11.

107 Benjamin Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting,” October 16 (April 1, 1981): 40-43.

For the Purists, Cocteau, and other “return to order” advocates, an embrace of traditional values was not considered antithetical to innovation. 108 As Cocteau aptly noted, unfortunately

“boldness in the painter is almost always confused with the boldness of the brush.” 109 In other words, stylistic radicalism should not always be equated with the political or social radicalism of the artist, nor should a lack of stylistic avant-gardism be immediately associated with conservatism. The Purists visualized this in the July 1921 issue of their periodical L’Esprit

Nouveau (The New Spirit, fig. 32). They placed images of Greek temples alongside images of automobiles, emphasizing that these examples of the classical and the modern shared the status of “purified products of a process akin to natural selection.” 110 They recognized the value and importance of both classical art and modern technology for creating an improved French avant- garde of the post-war period.

Similarly to the Purists, de Lempicka’s religious period exemplifies how interwar modernism and the “return to order” are more complex than previously acknowledged. As

Rajesh Heynickx suggests, we should not be so quick to see modernism and traditional figuration as completely opposed to one another. 111 Such a dichotomy presumes that modernism can be defined in stylistic terms alone; in reality, modernism is a broad, multifaceted movement that resists singular classification, emerging from a plethora of diverse, often contradictory

108 Cocteau and Fowlie, The Journals , 226. This passage from his Lettre aux Americains . Cocteau argues that tradition is not even inherently opposed to anarchy, which Cocteau believed to be the one true French tradition.

109 Cocteau and Fowlie, The Journals , 48.

110 Eliel et al, L’Esprit Nouveau, 40.

111 Rajesh Heynickx, “On the Road with Maritain. European Modernist Art Circles and Neo-Thomism During the Interwar” in Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism , ed. Rajesh Heynickx and Jan De Maeyer (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010): 17. Heynickx discusses Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), a Parisian author working contemporaneously to de Lempicka, who similarly explored the relationship between modernism and Catholicism through his work.

influences. De Lempicka’s works can be defined in this way, achieving a signature style through the combining of old and new inspirations, techniques, and theories. As Nowakowska-Sito aptly notes about de Lempicka’s style, “it was not traditionalism, but an attempt to view tradition through modern eyes.” 112 Simplistic and disdainful readings of the “return to order” as inherently conservative neglect to acknowledge how some artists working within the “return to order,” such as de Lempicka, may have done so out of necessity and subtly challenged its tenets even while working within it.

The Ambiguous Politics of Ecstasy

The “return to order” was an especially useful tool for foreign and female artists to secure a place for themselves in the French art world. The conservative associations of the movement helped counter their outsider identities, and in the case of de Lempicka, also provided a mask for her more subversive themes. While de Lempicka appropriated the strategies of Denis and the

FAM to navigate the conservative, nationalistic, and Catholic climate of interwar Paris, she also developed her own unique strategies through her engagement with the “return to order.” Her commitment to figuration, depiction of subjects such as religious types and peasants, and interest in the classical tradition was predisposed to the style supported by the “return to order.” 113

However, instead of emphasizing nationalistic order or purity, de Lempicka bolstered her already

112 Nowakowska-Sito, “Tamara de Lempicka and Poland,” 74.

113 Although de Lempicka’s commitment to figuration was seen in earlier erotic works, such as La Belle Rafaela (1927), and commissioned portraits of social elites and celebrities, such as the Portrait de la Duchess de la Salle (1925), in the mid-1930s she began to favor peasant women, Madonna figures, religious types, and allegorical figures as her subjects. Peasant women: La Polonaise (1933); Peasant Girl with a Pitcher (1937, fig. 34); Peasant Girl (1937, fig. 35). Madonna figures: The Blue Virgin (1934, fig. 36); Madonna (1937, fig. 37). Religious types: The Communicant (1928); Mother Superior (1935); Saint Anthony (1936, fig. 38); Saint John the Baptist (1936, fig. 39). Allegorical figures: Woman with a Mandolin (1929, fig. 40); Adam and Eve (1931, fig. 41); Graziella (1937, fig. 42).

established interest in the potential of ambiguity. I believe that de Lempicka developed her most idiosyncratic and ultimately successful strategic tool, the visage of ambiguous ecstasy, by manipulating the classicizing art promoted by the “return to order.” Her use of a multivalent expression of rapture in her figure’s faces became a defining visual motif in her oeuvre. I argue that de Lempicka conceived of this strategic device through her superficial connection to the

“return to order,” which led her to Italian Baroque sculptor Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini (1598 -

1680). De Lempicka’s deliberately indeterminate representations of ecstasy, inspired by

Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1645-1652, fig. 33), allowed her to adhere to the tenets of the “return to order” while continuing to explore transgressive eroticism in her work.

In an effort to more directly attract conservative viewers, de Lempicka took direction from the “return to order” and began to increasingly turn to classicizing Italian source material for inspiration. In particular, she was drawn to the Italian Renaissance and the Baroque periods. 114 She was inspired by the evocative facial types found in the work of Italian masters, including Pontormo, Parmigianino, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Ribera, and Bernini. Her special fascination with expressive visage is evident in sketches de Lempicka made after seeing works by these Italian painters. Her sketches often show cropped close ups of the faces of holy figures, including the Study of a Face, on the Model of the Madonna of the Magnificat by Botticelli

(1938, fig. 43) and the Study for “The Round Dance,” based on Madonna with the Long Neck by

Parmigianino (1932, fig. 44). De Lempicka also made a Study for “St. Teresa of Avila” (1930, fig. 45), a sketch based on Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa , a baroque sculpture located in

114 De Lempicka shows a particular affinity for Italian art of the past, but this was by no means her only source material. She was also influenced by French art she saw in the Louvre, as well as the work of Dutch and Flemish masters, like Rogier van der Weyden. She was also influenced by her Polish, Russian, and Parisian contemporaries. I have chosen to focus on her Italian influences here because they reveal de Lempicka’s particular interest in the convergence of two seemingly disparate themes, the religious and the erotic.

the Cornaro Chapel in Rome. De Lempicka seemed particularly inspired by the countenance of

Saint Teresa and turned the sketch into a painting, Saint Teresa d’Avila (1930, fig. 46), that same year. The artist’s fascination with the emotive expression of Saint Teresa, and particularly its ambiguous qualities, helped her to formulate the strategic conservatism operative in her work. 115

While de Lempicka’s studies of Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa primarily focus attention on the saint’s face, this is only one part of a much larger sculptural installation within the Cornaro Chapel. The sculptural group as a whole, and the story it tells, contextualizes de

Lempicka’s appropriations of Saint Teresa’s face as a motif. In addition to the figure of the saint, the main sculptural group also includes an angel holding a spear and golden rays of heavenly light that stream from above. Flanking the primary sculptural group are two illusionistic sculptural balconies, which depict members of the Cornaro family (fig. 47). The Cornaro family commissioned Bernini to adorn their chapel, and so they are depicted in perpetuity watching the scene of Saint Teresa’s ecstasy down below. 116 The face of Saint Teresa of Avila in Bernini’s

Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, intended to depict a moment of divine rapture also known as a transverberation, is known for its ability to stir emotion in its viewers. The saint’s face is framed in a hood-like shawl, her face tilted upwards, eyes closed, and lips parted. This scene was

115 Mori, The Queen of Modern , 355. Mori suggests that given the precision of the details, de Lempicka’s Study for “St. Tereasa d’Avila ” was done not directly from Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa , but from “a photograph of the saint’s face in isolation from the rest of the group.” However, Mori does not have evidence of such a photograph. I think that de Lempicka had every possibility to see and study Bernini’s sculpture in person. Based on her ability to achieve a remarkable level of detail for cropped faces in other studies done in situ, I see no reason to assume de Lempicka did differently with this study.

116 Bernini’s interest in theater design is apparent in his creation of a theatrical stage-like setting for his Ecstasy of Saint Teresa , complete with an ever-present marble audience. This relates to de Lempicka’s interest in the uplifted trance-like expression of Saint Teresa. Although acknowledging that de Lempicka’s primary inspiration for this expression likely came from Christian art, some scholars interpret her longstanding interest in this expression as equally influenced by cinematic culture. Female movie stars in the 1920s and 1930s, like Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, fig. 48), often made a similar expression to physically indicate emotion in a silent format. De Lempicka may have recognized a similarity between popular cinematic depiction of feminine expression and Bernini’s theatrical Baroque expression. Mori, The Queen of Modern , 236.

intended to depict a vision described by Saint Teresa in her autobiographical work, The Life of

St. Teresa of Jesus . These accounts of spiritual visions by the 16 th century Spanish nun, during the height of the Reformation, are what led the Catholic church to canonize her as a saint. In her book, she explains seeing a vision of an angel and states the following about the encounter:

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it, even a large one. 117

Her description of this spiritual vision uses sexualized language as a way to convey the state of religious transportation that she experienced. She recounts, for example, being pierced by a flame-tipped spear and filled with a pain so great it made her moan—an image that in modern times would be called “phallic.” Saint Teresa conflates the bodily and the spiritual, a duality that manifests visually in Bernini’s sculpture.

The potential to read Bernini’s sculpture in conflicting ways, as either a rendering of divine rapture or as a blasphemous depiction of a saintly figure, was not lost on contemporary or later viewers. For example, the Marquis de Sade (1740 - 1814), upon seeing the sculpture, wrote in his diary, “the piece is sublime… because of the air of truth that characterizes it, but when seeing it one has to keep reminding oneself that she is a Saint, because from Teresa’s ecstatic appearance, and from the fire that embraces her expression, one could be easily mistaken.” 118 As the Marquis notes, the representation of the face was ambiguous, blurring the lines between

117 Saint Teresa of Avila, The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus , Translated from Spanish by David Lewis, additional notes and introduction by Rev. Fr. Benedict Zimmermann, O.C.D., 2005.

118 Donatien-Alphonse-François Marquis de Sade quoted in Dany Nobus, “The Sculptural Iconography of Feminine Jouissance Saint Teresa in Ecstasy,” Comparatist 39 (October 1, 2015): 23.

divine ecstasy in the presence of God and the opposingly human ecstasy of carnal passion. The

Marquis de Sade, the French writer and philosopher for whom the term ‘sadism’ was named, was known for his interest in transgressive eroticism and liberation of sexual deviancy. He appreciated the potential in Bernini’s sculpture to subvert spiritual ecstasy on a philosophical and personal level. De Lempicka saw the sculpture’s ambiguous ecstasy as a tool to invest her oeuvre with another layer of strategic conservatism.

Scholars have identified one of the most common facial motifs in de Lempicka’s oeuvre as a “swooning trance-like expression.” 119 Her use of this expression stems from her interest in the ambiguous potential of Saint Teresa’s face in Bernini’s sculpture. Throughout her oeuvre, de

Lempicka repeats certain facial types and specific expressions in her paintings. Although this repetition resulted in part from the artist’s consistent use of the same models for her works, one of the most common being her daughter Kizette, it is also a product of her artistic influences. 120

Variations of this ecstatic, uplifted face with glazed-over eyes can be found in numerous de

Lempicka paintings that bridge her work of the 1920s and the 1930s, including Andromeda

(1921, fig. 49), The Communicant (1929), and La Polonaise (1933) among others. While

Andromeda is typically viewed in the scholarship on de Lempicka as part of her early erotic period, and The Communicant and La Polonaise are seen as later religious or conservative images, these works were all inspired by the “return to order.” De Lempicka’s Andromeda depicts a modern version of a classical story taken from Greek mythology. The young

Andromeda awaits rescue while chained to a rock as sacrifice to a sea monster. However, as

119 Irollo, “A Modern Mannerist,” 68-75.

120 Ingried Brugger, “Sang-froid and Frenzy,” in Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon , ed. Alain Blondel (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2004): 36.

Bade notes, “with her scarlet lipstick and elegantly coiffed hair and shown against a modern urban setting, de Lempicka’s Andromeda looks more like a participant in a sado-masochistic orgy.” 121 De Lempicka utilizes a “return to order” classical reference as inspiration for a contemporary depiction of potentially transgressive eroticism. Her seemingly contradictory use of the saint’s face, as inspiration for both sexual and pious appearing paintings, reveals her mobilization of the visage as part of her project of strategic ambiguity. In this regard, the motif is key to understanding both de Lempicka’s use of “return to order” classical references and how her seemingly divergent periods, of the early 1920s and the later 1930s, relate to one another.

For de Lempicka, Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa becomes a prime example within the art historical tradition of the double image of holy rapture and “feminine jouissance.” 122 This allows her to balance the expectations of her conservative climate with her own transgressive interests. One example of this blurring between the spiritual and the sexual can be found in de

Lempicka’s The Communicant . The young girl, dressed in layered robes of stark white for her first communion, at first glance appears the picture of innocence and piety. 123 She is modestly dressed, with only her cherubic face and hands loosely clasped in prayer visible to the viewer.

Her expression is one of swooning piety, her eyes uplifted towards the heavens and glazed over as if in a trance. Before her is a small red structure, just wide enough to hold an open book,

121 Bade, Tamara de Lempicka , 147.

122 Nobus, “The Sculptural Iconography of Feminine Jouissance,” 28.

123 In Christian faiths, particularly in Roman Catholicism, the First Communion is when a child first receives the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist. Typically, children wear white on this occasion to symbolize purity. Communicants often receive religious gifts during this celebration, such as holy books and rosaries, to aid in their spiritual practice. As this Catholic rite of passage is often completed at the child’s entrance into the age of reason, usually around age fourteen, it therefore corresponds to the timing of other cultural rites of passage into adulthood. For young girls, such as de Lempicka’s Communicant , herein lies a possible conflict between innocent purity and becoming a woman.

suggesting it is the top of a prayer bench or kneeler. All these visual clues seem to mark the painting as a pious and specifically Catholic image.

However, closer analysis reveals multivalent symbolism and iconography that suggests the young communicant “carries with her an awareness of lost innocence,” giving the work a double meaning. 124 In addition to the figure’s swooning expression, several other elements in the painting carry both religious and erotic connotations. As noted above, the dove unveiling the young girl from her modest costume is one such example. 125 Another ambiguous symbol in the painting is the open book in front of the communicant. While presumably a Catholic missal or hymnal due to its placement on top of a prayer kneeler, at face value we see a young woman reading a holy book, looking up at the heavens in the midst of a spiritual experience. This would seem to fit into the “return to order” program, which elevated Catholic values as part of its conservative and nation healing agenda. However, when we consider de Lempicka’s interest in blurring distinctions between the sacred and the profane, the book changes. We notice that the book actually has no definitive indication of its subject. The pages are remarkably blank, and although the book is open as if being read, the girl’s eyes are averted from it. This open, empty book is another motif commonly utilized by adherents to the “return to order.” For example, the still life works of the Purists often contained books with no text on the pages as part of their

124 Brugger, “Sang-froid and Frenzy,” 41.

125 Adolphe Napoléon Didron, Christian Iconography; the History of Christian Art in the Middle Ages , translated from the French by E.J. Millington (New York: F. Ungar Pub. Company, 1965): 447. The dove is also located by the girl’s ear, reminiscent of artistic depictions of Saint Gregory the Great by Baroque artists such as Jusepe de Ribera. In images of Saint Gregory or Pope Gregory I, the dove is an attribute of the saint and a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. It references the story of Saint Gregory, in which his writings were dictated through him by a dove whispering in his ear, singing Gregorian chants. Ribera, follower of Caravaggio, was a likely source of inspiration for de Lempicka.

visual elimination of extraneous information in their work.126 The blank book is also represented in de Lempicka’s La Polonaise , Kizette in Pink (1926, fig. 50), and Reclining Nude with a Book

(1927, fig. 51). In all of these images, erotic, religious, or otherwise, the book is never being actively read by the figure, making de Lempicka’s inclusion of it in these images mysterious.

What story is the book supposed to tell? Is the blankness of the book a critique of the Catholic church as being full of empty words? De Lempicka’s manipulation of the “return to order” inspired empty book for a subversive and anti-Catholic message seems possible. 127

De Lempicka’s La Polonaise coalesces the strategies she learned from Denis and the

FAM, previously discussed, with her own formulation of ambiguous ecstasy to subvert the conservative associations tied to the figures of peasant women during this period. Just as de

Lempicka may have deliberately used ambiguity as a tool to challenge Catholic values through the supposedly pious painting The Communicant , she may have similarly used strategic conservatism to challenge nationalist rhetoric through her La Polonaise . As previously noted, the identity of the Polish girl, as signified by her shawl, would have subverted the traditional use of the peasant as a symbol of French nationalism. However, a comparison of this painting, which

126 Kenneth Silver, "Purism: Straightening Up After the Great War," Artforum (March 1977): 56-63. Silver provides the example of Le Corbusier’s Still Life with Book, Glass, and Pipe , 1918.

127 Nowakowska-Sito, “Tamara de Lempicka and Poland,” 77. In order to understand what may have prompted such an ambiguous image of a Catholic subject, de Lempicka’s biography may in this case provide useful context. Although raised and married to her first husband within the faith, when the artist desired a divorce the church did not condone it, instead only allowing an annulment. Many Catholics in the interwar years converted to Protestantism to obtain divorces and remarry. Given de Lempicka’s open bisexuality, it is also clear that she likely had a complex or even contentious relationship with the church, although she did send her daughter to Catholic school for most of her childhood. While it is unclear what de Lempicka’s specific feelings towards the church were, it is evident that while not being an active practitioner, she retained close ties to it and perhaps expressed her ambiguity about the faith and its institution through her works.

was exhibited in a New York Macy’s exhibition, to the original version, Polish Girl 1 (1933, fig.

52), now unfortunately lost, reveals further potentially subversive qualities. 128

The original version of La Polonaise or Polish Girl I , which was exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries and sold to the French ambassador to Canada, one Monsieur Léger, exists now only as a black and white photograph. Evident in this photograph, however, are the stark compositional changes de Lempicka made to the subject between her two versions. In the original, the woman’s head is downturned, her face blank with a detached expression. This version lacks resemblance to Saint Teresa’s uplifted expression of rapture found in the second iteration of the painting. Unlike the second version, in Polish Girl I , the figure wears jewelry, including a large beaded necklace and a ring on her left ring finger. This suggests that the original conception of this image was of an older, possibly married woman. 129 Why, then, would de Lempicka chose to eliminate this component in her second version, which very well could have sold fine as an exact copy of the first? I believe the changes show a decision to make the work more potentially subversive by enhancing the elements of ambiguity and distancing the woman from the traditional role of wife. While her original version of a pious, wedded, and modest young woman more directly reflected the nationalistic, conservative, Catholic, and male- dominated rhetoric of the era, her second version subverted the “return to order” to accommodate her more provocative artistic messages.

128 Mori, The Queen of Modern , 360.

129 Mori, The Queen of Modern , 360. De Lempicka herself was known to wear large beaded necklaces and adorn her hands with gem-filled rings. Given that the work was created around the time of her second marriage to Baron Kuffner, it is possible to interpret the original as a pseudo-self-portrait. However, de Lempicka famously stated in a 1936 letter to patron and close confidant Gino Puglisi that “every one of my paintings is a self-portrait.” Additionally, in a 1934 letter from de Lempicka to Puglisi discussing the sale of the work, the artist referred to the painting as “la Messe,” which translates to “Mass,” a term used to describe the celebration of the Eucharist in the Roman Catholic Church.

Her revised version was sold to one of her best patrons and close confidant, Gino

Puglisi. 130 De Lempicka would surely have more freedom for artistic transgressions with Puglisi than with an ambassador. Puglisi was an avid collector of the art of female artists working in

France, including the work of Marie Laurencin (1883 - 1956) and Madeleine Luka (1894 -

1989). Much like de Lempicka, Laurencin was known for cultivating certain qualities, in her case feminine ones, in her work and public persona to better appeal to conservative markets. 131 It is interesting therefore that Puglisi, as a collector of art by women artists, was drawn to those who were tactical in their approaches. Between 1933 and 1950, Puglisi bought fifty of de

Lempicka’s paintings, including many of those which could be classified as “return to order” in style and content, but which had transgressive undertones. 132

Tamara de Lempicka’s works of the late 1920s and 1930s exhibit a remarkable interaction with their historical and political context. These works utilize the stylistic and thematic tenets of the “return to order” to tactically navigate the rising Catholicism and nationalism of interwar Paris. There is an existing understanding in the scholarship of de

Lempicka as a painter of women in masks. Her women have been described as

“masquerading” 133 “robot-women” 134 who outwardly express ideals and norms they do not subscribe to internally. Her paintings The Communicant and La Polonaise acted as “public

130 Mori, The Queen of Modern , 312. De Lempicka painted three portraits of Puglisi throughout her life, the last Portrait of Gino Puglisi done in 1949 (fig. 53).

131 Bridget Elliott, “The ‘Strength of the Weak’ as Portrayed by Marie Laurencin” in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds., Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005): 276-99.

132 These included the aforementioned The Blue Virgin and La Polonaise . 133 Patricia Bloom, “Dressing up Modernity: Decoration as Strategy in Art Deco Images of Women” (Ph.D. Dissertation, New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2002): 11, 176.

134 Lefrancois, “Evangelist and Robot Woman,” 76-97.

masquerades… to construct a disguise which complied with marketable stereotypes.” 135 De

Lempicka “devised a form of figurative painting that could reveal the fragmented nature of the individual persona, torn between social considerations and hidden passions.” 136 In this way, works like The Communicant and La Polonaise outwardly express the conservative, moral, and traditional ideals associated with the “return to order,” without internally subscribing to them. As this chapter has shown, when these works are analyzed and interpreted through the lens of de

Lempicka’s known interest in the erotic, and her specific artistic references to art historical depictions of ambiguous ecstasy, they are revealed as potentially subversive.

135 Gillian Perry, “Women Painting Women,” in Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde: Modernism and Feminine Art, 1900 to the Late 1920s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995): 117.

136 Brugger, “Sang-froid and Frenzy,” 38.

CONCLUSION

In the last few years, there has been a noticeable surge in the publicity, visibility, and popularity of Tamara de Lempicka and her work. As the artist is increasingly thrust into the limelight by the press and popular media, it is important to note how she is being represented and the implications of these portrayals, not only for the sake of de Lempicka’s work, but for other marginalized artists on the verge of “rediscovery” as well. Some recent developments are exciting in their capacity to elevate, reassess, and recontextualize de Lempicka and her oeuvre.

However, others pose potential problems to future critical study and public perception of the artist by reinforcing biographical emphasis on her work. In this pivotal moment of de

Lempicka’s return to the dominant narrative, it is imperative that we move in a direction that forwards intellectual, multivalent inquiry of the work of women émigré artists, rather than allowing regression towards sensationalized stereotyping and further marginalization.

One recent headlining development is de Lempicka’s record breaking auction sale at

Christie’s in London on January 5 th , 2020. De Lempicka’s Portrait de Marjorie Ferry (1932, fig.

54) sold for £16.28 million ($21.1 million), surpassing the auction record of $13.3 million set just three months prior at Sotheby’s in New York with her La Tunique Rose (1927, fig. 55). This new record is significant not only for its suggested valuation trajectory, but also because de

Lempicka’s work was sold in Christie’s Impressionism and Modern Art auction, rather than an

Art Deco sale. 137 Within the existing stylistic hierarchies of art history, this reaffirms de

Lempicka’s oeuvre as part of a serious, intellectual, modernist history as opposed to continuing to link her to Art Deco and its decorative associations. Her work was not only included alongside

137 Colin Gleadell, “Tamara De Lempicka Joins Magritte and Giacometti as the Star of Christie’s $138.9 Million Impressionist and Modern Sale,” Artnet News , February 5, 2020.

the work of Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, and other canonical male artists, but it managed to outperform them, making her the star of the auction. While the financial success of women artists like de Lempicka often made them targets of attack in the early 20 th century, today such positive auction results can help establish a more secure place for de Lempicka within the art historical canon. Her elevation in the art market challenges the gendered hierarchical foundations of the canon itself.

In addition to outshining the modern masters at auction, de Lempicka’s work is also finally making an appearance in modern art exhibitions. Previously seen as an independent and self-taught artist, with a style that did not easily conform to any established movement or “-ism,” de Lempicka’s work was primarily exhibited in solo exhibitions. Even then, such exhibitions were few and far between. For example, the Kosciuszko Foundation’s recent October 2019 exhibition, “The Many Faces of Tamara de Lempicka,” was the first exhibition devoted to the artist in the United States since 1961. The public visibility of de Lempicka’s paintings in solo exhibitions is crucial to her resurgence and pivotal to the development of new scholarship on the artist, such as this thesis. However, the inclusion of her work in group exhibitions is equally essential, providing the context required for a full understanding of her oeuvre. Of particular note was the September 2019 exhibition, “Rendezvous in Paris: Picasso, Chagall, Modigliani & Co

(1900-1939),” held at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. This exhibition highlighted the work of the artists loosely grouped together as the “School of Paris,” and significantly included the work of de

Lempicka within this category. 138 By including her work in this exhibition, an important claim

138 Alexandra Chaves, “Review: the new show at Louvre Abu Dhabi offers a glimpse into Paris's global art heyday,” Arts&Culture , September 18, 2019.

was made for her rightful place in this art historical narrative, an equal alongside other immigrant artists working within the Parisian avant-garde.

Another recent announcement regarding de Lempicka is perhaps more dubious in its potential implications for understanding the artist and her career. A musical, titled Lempicka, directed by Tony winner Rachel Chavkin, is scheduled to debut on Broadway during the 2020-

2021 season. The show received wide acclaim following its premiere at the 2018 Williamstown

Theater Festival, with the New York Times calling it a “woke throwback” for its portrayal of the bisexual artist’s life in interwar Paris. 139 However, its dramatic telling of her story, with an apparent emphasis on her romance with Rafaela Fano, the model for sexualized nudes such as La

Tunique Rose , has the potential to skew the dominant interpretation of de Lempicka’s oeuvre back towards the biographical. While the effect or repercussions of the musical must wait to be seen, its emergence acts as a useful reminder for how popular culture and media can impact the realm of art historical analysis, the art market, and posthumous public perceptions of artists and their oeuvres. Even a play, by emphasizing de Lempicka’s personal sexuality, could have a potentially detrimental impact on the efforts made by this thesis to combat trivializing biographical interpretations and reassert de Lempicka as an historically conscious, strategic, and intellectually motivated artist.

139 Clayton Schuster, “Tamara de Lempicka: Her Art is Breaking Records, Her Life is on its Way to Broadway,” The New York Observer, February 1, 2020.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Tamara de Lempicka, La Belle Rafaela , 1927. Oil on canvas.

Figure 2: Tamara de Lempicka, Portrait de la Duchess de la Salle , 1925. Oil on canvas.

Figure 3: Tamara de Lempicka, La Polonaise (Version 2), 1933. Oil on wood.

Figure 4: Tamara de Lempicka, The Communicant , 1928. Oil on canvas.

Figure 5: Tamara de Lempicka, Mother Superior , 1935. Oil on wood.

Figure 6: Tamara de Lempicka, Maternity , 1922. Oil on canvas.

Figure 7: Maurice Denis, Maternity with Lace Cuff, 1895. Oil on canvas.

Figure 8: Maurice Denis, Mother in a Black Blouse, 1895. Oil on canvas.

Figure 9: Tamara de Lempicka, Maternity , 1928. Oil on canvas.

Figure 10: Maurice Denis and Andre Gide, Le Voyage D’Urien (cover, woodcut), 1893. Text illustrated with lithographs.

Figure 11: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin Rouge: La Goulue , 1891. Color lithograph.

Figure 12: Maurice Denis, The Muses , 1893. Oil on canvas.

Figure 13: Fra Angelico, The Annunciation , c. 1438-47. Fresco, (Convent of San Marco, Florence).

Figure 14: Maurice Denis, The Communicants , first panel of Frauenliebe und Leben (Women’s Love and Life), 7- panel bedroom frieze, 1895. Distemper on canvas mounted on wood. Photograph taken 1898.

Figure 15: Paul Gauguin, Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) , 1888. Oil on canvas.

Figure 16: Maurice Denis, The Breton Dance , 1891. Oil on canvas.

Figure 17: Maurice Denis, Screen with Doves , four-panel screen, 1896.

Figure 18: Maurice Denis, Vault decorations for the Sacred Heart Chapel , Church of Sainte- Marguerite, Le Vésinet, 1903. Photo from before fire damage to the decorations in 2009.

Figure 19: Jacopo da Pontormo, Portrait of Maria Salviati de' Medici and Giulia de' Medici , c.1539. Oil on canvas.

Figure 20: Tamara de Lempicka, Breton Girl, 1934. Oil on canvas.

Figure 21: Tamara de Lempicka, Woman with Dove , 1931. Oil on canvas.

Figure 22: Mela Muter, Mother and Child with Haloes , 1916. Oil on canvas.

Figure 23: Marie Blanchard, Maternity , 1925. Oil on canvas.

Figure 24: Tamara de Lempicka, At the Window , 1932. Oil on canvas.

Figure 25: Zofia Stryjenska, Boy at the Window , from the series Youthful Polish Villages , 1930.

Figure 26: Moise Kisling, Woman in a Polish Shawl , 1928. Oil on canvas.

Figure 27: Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People , 1830. Oil on canvas.

Figure 28: Glykon von Athen, Farnese Hercules , 216 AD. Marble.

Figure 29: Pablo Picasso, Three Women at the Spring , 1921. Oil on canvas.

Figure 30: Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman , 1921. Pastel on paper.

Figure 31: Le Corbusier, Still Life , 1920. Oil on canvas.

Figure 32: L’Esprit Nouveau, No. 10 (July 1921), pages 1140 and 1141.

Figure 33: Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, detail of The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa , 1647-52. Marble.

Figure 34: Tamara de Lempicka, Peasant Girl with a Pitcher , 1937. Oil on board.

Figure 35: Tamara de Lempicka, Peasant Girl , 1937. Oil on board.

Figure 36: Tamara de Lempicka, The Blue Virgin , 1934. Oil on board.

Figure 37: Tamara de Lempicka, Madonna , 1937. Oil on panel.

Figure 38: Tamara de Lempicka, Saint Anthony , 1936. Oil on canvas.

Figure 39: Tamara de Lempicka, Saint John the Baptist , 1936. Oil on cardboard.

Figure 40: Tamara de Lempicka, Woman with a Mandolin , 1929. Oil on canvas.

Figure 41: Tamara de Lempicka, Adam and Eve , 1931. Oil on canvas.

Figure 42: Tamara de Lempicka, Graziella , 1937. Oil on board.

Figure 43: Tamara de Lempicka, Study of a Face, on the Model of the Madonna of the Magnificat by Botticelli , 1938. Pencil on paper.

Figure 44: Tamara de Lempicka, Study for “The Round Dance ,” 1932. Pencil on paper.

Figure 45: Tamara de Lempicka, Study for “St Teresa of Avila ,” 1930. Pencil on paper. 59

Figure 46: Tamara de Lempicka, Saint Teresa d’Avila , 1930. Oil on canvas.

Figure 48: Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc , directed by Carl Th. Dreyer, 1928.

Figure 49: Tamara de Lempicka, Andromeda , 1929. Oil on canvas.

Figure 50: Tamara de Lempicka, Kizette in Pink , 1926. Oil on canvas.

Figure 51: Tamara de Lempicka, Reclining Nude with a Book , 1927. Oil on canvas.

Figure 52: Tamara de Lempicka, La Polonaise (The Polish Girl 1, Version 1), 1933. Oil on wood, Lost.

Figure 53: Tamara de Lempicka, Portrait of Gino Puglisi , 1949. Oil on canvas.

Figure 54: Tamara de Lempicka, Portrait de Marjorie Ferry , 1932. Oil on canvas.

Figure 55: Tamara de Lempicka, La Tunique Rose , 1927. Oil on canvas.

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