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Lempicka Painted the Aristocracy She Married Into, Then Outran Them All
Tamara de Lempicka was born Tamara Rosalia Gurwik-Górska in Warsaw, probably in 1898 (the exact year is disputed; Lempicka herself gave several different dates across her life). Her family was wealthy bourgeois Polish-Jewish, with roots in both Warsaw and St Petersburg. She married a Polish lawyer, Tadeusz Łempicki, in St Petersburg in 1916. The Bolshevik Revolution caught them there in October 1917. Tadeusz was arrested by the Cheka in early 1918. Tamara secured his release by sleeping with a Swedish consul who had connections to the Bolshevik authorities. The couple escaped to Copenhagen, then to London, then to Paris by spring 1918. They were among the early waves of White Russian émigrés who would reshape Paris society in the 1920s. Paris By 1920 the Lempickis were broke. Tamara had brought no money from Russia, and Tadeusz could not find legal work in Paris. She had no professional training. She decided to support the family by painting. She enrolled briefly at the Académie Ranson and studied with Maurice Denis, then transferred to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in 1922 and studied with André Lhote. Lhote, who was teaching a kind of decorative Cubism, taught her the structural method that would underlie all her mature work: bodies built from geometric forms, sharply outlined, modelled with strong directional light. She would credit Lhote, throughout her life, as the only teacher who had taught her anything she could use. By 1923 she was exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne. Her first major sale (a portrait of Ira Perrot, a society neighbour) was in 1924. By 1925 she was painting the people who could afford to commission her: Polish émigré aristocrats, French industrialists, occasional foreign nobles passing through Paris. Her prices rose quickly through the late 1920s. She was one of the highest-paid female portraitists of the decade. The Style The Lempicka manner combined several sources that should not have fit together. From Lhote: the structural Cubism, the simplification of bodies into faceted geometric forms. From Italian Mannerism (which she had studied during a year-long visit to Italy in 1926): the elongated necks, the long fingers, the slightly artificial proportions, the heavy modelling of single figures against backgrounds reduced to architecture or sky. From Art Deco design (which was reaching its peak in Paris during her formative years): the highly polished surfaces, the bold colour blocking, the sense that the painted figure was a designed object. The combination was hers alone. Other artists had used pieces of it (Lhote himself was working a Cubist idiom; Italian Novecento painters were quoting Mannerism), but no one else produced the specific Lempicka effect: a portrait that looked like a piece of Art Deco metalwork, with the sitter cast in some unbreakable polished material. The Bugatti The 1929 self-portrait Tamara in the Green Bugatti is the painting that defined her public image. It shows her at the wheel of a green sports car, wearing a leather helmet and grey gloves, the background a vertical strip of grey sky and skyscrapers. She did not actually own a Bugatti. She drove a small yellow Renault. The picture was commissioned by Die Dame, a German fashion magazine, for a cover image. The Bugatti was an invention to suit the magazine. The painting became Lempicka's icon. It captures, in a single image, what she sold to her clients: a woman in control of speed, of modernity, of self-presentation, painted in the same hard-edged style that defined the architecture of the period. The cover was published in July 1929, three months before the Wall Street crash. The Marriage The Lempicki marriage did not survive Paris success. Tadeusz had never recovered psychologically from the Russian imprisonment and the loss of his Polish legal career. He drank heavily. Tamara had affairs throughout the 1920s, including with the German-Austrian Baron Raoul Kuffner, who was one of her major patrons. The couple divorced in 1928. Tamara took their daughter Kizette and continued painting. Tadeusz returned to Poland and died there in 1939, shortly before the German invasion. Tamara married Baron Kuffner in 1934 and became Baroness Kuffner. The marriage was financially comfortable and largely affectionate; Kuffner died in 1962 and Tamara never remarried. The 1930s The Depression hit her commercial practice hard. The wealthy clients who had been commissioning portraits in 1929 had less money in 1932. Lempicka adjusted by lowering her prices, taking smaller commissions, and (for the first time) painting non-commissioned subjects: female nudes, still lifes, religious scenes. By the late 1930s, she had moved to a more sober palette, less polished surfaces, and more conventional compositions. The change has been read as a response to the rise of Socialist Realism in Europe, but it was probably just a market adjustment. The hard-edged Art Deco manner had gone out of fashion. The portrait clients who remained wanted softer, more flattering work. The Lempickis left Paris in 1939, as Europe slid toward war. The Baron's properties in Hungary had been seized by the Hungarian government in 1939, and the family had to abandon them. They sailed to New York in early 1940 and then to Hollywood, where they bought a small house. Lempicka tried to establish a portrait practice in Los Angeles. The American market for European Art Deco portraiture was small and provincial. The practice did not really work. The Long Decline Lempicka spent the next two decades attempting to relaunch her career, with limited success. She had exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, and (occasionally) Paris through the 1940s and 1950s, but the reception was tepid. The Art Deco style she had defined twenty years earlier had become deeply unfashionable. The art world was dominated by Abstract Expressionism, and Lempicka's polished figurative work was treated as a relic. She continued painting. The work from the 1950s and 1960s is mostly small still lifes, portraits of friends, and occasional religious subjects (she had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1934). The technique was still excellent. The subjects were diminished. She was painting what she could find to paint rather than what she had once chosen. Cuernavaca In 1974, Tamara left Houston (where she had been living with Kizette and Kizette's husband) and moved to Cuernavaca in Mexico. She had been there several times on holiday and decided she preferred the climate. She bought a house called Tres Bambúes and lived there until her death. The last years were quiet. She painted little. She was visited by Kizette and by a few friends. She continued to receive small commissions from local Mexican families. Her international reputation was at its lowest point since the 1920s. She died on 18 March 1980, aged eighty-one or eighty-two. Her ashes were scattered over the crater of the Popocatépetl volcano, according to her wishes. The Recovery The reappraisal began in the late 1970s, even before her death. The Centre Pompidou's 1972 exhibition Les Années 25 (a celebration of the 1925 Paris Exposition that had given Art Deco its name) had included several Lempicka portraits and reintroduced her to French audiences. The 1980 Lucie Smith retrospective in Paris, shortly after her death, made her standing as the central Art Deco portraitist of the 1920s explicit. By the 1990s, her prices were rising sharply at auction. The Green Bugatti self-portrait sold at Sotheby's in 2009 for $6.1 million. The 1929 portrait of Marjorie Ferry sold for $20.5 million in 2020. Madonna had become an early major Lempicka collector in the 1980s. Other celebrities (Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand) followed. The painter who had been famous in 1929, forgotten in 1959, and dead in obscurity in 1980 became, by 2010, the most commercially successful female Art Deco artist on the market. The aristocracy she had painted in the 1920s had been displaced by the global financial elite. The new clients still wanted what her old clients had wanted: a portrait that looked like a piece of polished, unbreakable design.
Duchamp Submitted a Urinal to the 1917 Independents and the Jury Hid It
In April 1917, the Society of Independent Artists held its first exhibition at the Grand Central Palace in New York. The Society had been founded the previous December on the principle that there would be no jury and no prizes. Anyone who paid the membership fee of six dollars could submit two works, and the Society pledged to exhibit every submission. On 9 April, a wooden crate arrived at the exhibition hall. Inside was a porcelain urinal of the kind manufactured by the J. L. Mott Iron Works on Fifth Avenue. It had been turned on its back, signed in black paint with the name "R. Mutt" and the date 1917, and labelled as the entry "Fountain" by R. Mutt of Philadelphia. The six-dollar submission fee had been paid. The Society's board met in private. The board removed the urinal from the floor, never displayed it, and never returned it. The exhibition ran for several weeks. Many of the artists who had submitted lesser-known work to the Society were now exhibited; the Fountain was not. R. Mutt did not collect his urinal. Who Was R. Mutt R. Mutt was Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was a French painter who had moved to New York in 1915 to escape the war. He had already become known for the painting Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, which had caused a scandal at the 1913 New York Armory Show. By 1917, he was one of the founding members of the Society of Independent Artists and on its board of directors. The Fountain submission was a test. Duchamp wanted to know whether the Society would actually honour its pledge to exhibit every submission, or whether the no-jury principle was a pose. He used the pseudonym R. Mutt (a play on the Mott Iron Works manufacturer's name and on the contemporary Mutt and Jeff cartoon strip) so that the board would not know it was him. He paid the six dollars from his own pocket. He waited to see what would happen. The board (which did not know R. Mutt was Duchamp) voted to suppress the entry by a narrow margin. The arguments were that the urinal was vulgar, that it was plagiarism (since Duchamp had not made it), and that it was simply not art. The vote was not unanimous; several board members (notably Walter Arensberg, a key Duchamp patron) voted to keep it. Duchamp resigned from the board immediately. He had not announced himself as the artist. He resigned on the grounds that the Society had failed its founding principle. Within days, the news that Fountain had been suppressed was circulating in New York art circles. The Photograph The original urinal disappeared shortly after the suppression. It was almost certainly thrown away. What survives is a photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 Gallery, sometime after the suppression. Duchamp had taken the urinal to Stieglitz, set it up against a painted backdrop (a painting by Marsden Hartley was used as the background), and asked Stieglitz to photograph it. The photograph was published in a small art journal called The Blind Man in May 1917. The Blind Man article that accompanied the photograph included an editorial defending Fountain. The argument was simple: "Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view — created a new thought for that object." The editorial was probably written by Duchamp himself, with the help of Beatrice Wood and Henri-Pierre Roché. It is the first explicit theoretical defence of the readymade as a category in art. The argument compresses what Duchamp had been working on for several years: that the act of selection, in art, was equivalent to the act of making. Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 21 June 1917, New York City. Duchamp photographed himself five times in the same composition, using a mirrored arrangement that allowed him to appear in profile, three-quarter, and full-face simultaneously. The Readymades Duchamp had begun making what he called "readymades" in 1913. The first was a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool. He had also made (and destroyed) a number of others before Fountain: a bottle rack, a snow shovel inscribed In Advance of the Broken Arm. The principle was always the same. He selected an ordinary manufactured object. He named it and signed it. He declared it to be art. The argument behind the readymades had several layers. The most obvious was that the artist's act was the act of selection, not the act of making. The deeper layer was about the question of what constitutes an art object at all. If a urinal could be art when selected and signed, then the conditions that made other things art (the painter's labour, the marble carving, the aesthetic judgment) could be analysed and questioned. The Fountain suppression made these arguments visible in public for the first time. Before 1917, the readymades had been private studio works. After 1917, they were the centrepiece of an ongoing argument about the nature of art that has not yet been settled. What Happened to the Urinal The original Fountain disappeared, almost certainly thrown out by the Society staff after the exhibition closed. Duchamp commissioned several replicas over the next fifty years. The first replica, made in 1950 for an exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A 1964 edition of eight replicas, made under Duchamp's supervision by the Galerie Schwarz in Milan, is now distributed across major museums: the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Indiana University Art Museum, and several private collections. The 1964 replicas are based on the Stieglitz photograph rather than the original urinal, since the original had been lost. The replicas are slightly larger than the original would have been and use a different model of porcelain urinal. They are nonetheless "the Fountain" in the institutional sense: Duchamp authorised them, the museums treat them as the work, the historical record refers to them as Fountain. What the Suppression Established The Society's suppression of Fountain was a public failure of the no-jury principle. The Society went on for several years (its annual exhibitions continued through the 1920s), but it never again claimed to be an open society. The pretence had been tested and broken. The argument that the suppression made possible was larger. Duchamp's Fountain, and the readymade principle behind it, became the founding move of conceptual art. The line that runs from Fountain through Dada, through Pop Art, through Conceptualism, through institutional critique, and into much of the contemporary art of the past sixty years, starts in April 1917. The 2004 survey of British art professionals, organised by Turner Prize patrons, voted Fountain the most influential artwork of the twentieth century. The vote was about a urinal that was never actually exhibited and was thrown out within weeks. Duchamp Afterwards Duchamp made no paintings after 1923 and (apparently) very little art of any kind after the late 1920s. He had publicly declared himself bored with painting. He spent the next forty years playing chess at competitive level, writing chess columns for newspapers, and making occasional small works in private. He maintained that he had retired from art. The retirement was a pose. From 1946 to 1966, Duchamp secretly worked on a single large installation, Étant donnés, a 3-D tableau viewed through a peephole in a wooden door, showing a nude female figure in a landscape. He worked on it in a studio in New York that nobody knew about. He left it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art at his death in 1968. The museum installed it according to his instructions, and it has been on display since. The Étant donnés revealed that the most influential conceptualist of the twentieth century had spent his official retirement years secretly making a single large object. The retirement had been a strategy. The argument Duchamp had begun in 1917 (about the conditions under which a thing becomes art) was being conducted, in his own studio, for another fifty years.
The Bayeux Tapestry Is 70 Metres Long and Was Probably Made by English Nuns
The Bayeux Tapestry is approximately seventy metres long and fifty centimetres tall. It is not a tapestry. A tapestry is woven; the Bayeux work is embroidered, with woollen yarn worked onto a linen cloth in eight different colours. It tells the story of the 1066 Norman Conquest of England in fifty-eight scenes, with a Latin inscription running above the figures throughout. It is the most extensive piece of pictorial narrative art surviving from the eleventh century. The cloth has hung in various locations for nearly nine hundred years. It was almost certainly made within ten years of the events it depicts. It survived the French Revolution (when it was nearly cut up to cover a baggage wagon), the Napoleonic Wars (when Napoleon ordered it brought to Paris for examination), and the German occupation of France (when the Nazis nearly shipped it to Germany before the Allied advance forced them to abandon the plan). It now hangs in a purpose-built museum in Bayeux, Normandy, where it has been since 1983. Who Made It The cloth was almost certainly made in England, not in Normandy. The evidence is technical and stylistic. The embroidery uses techniques (laid-and-couched work, stem stitch, split stitch) that were specialties of Anglo-Saxon embroidery workshops. The same techniques are documented in surviving fragments of English ecclesiastical embroidery from the same period. The Latin inscriptions use spellings characteristic of Anglo-Saxon Latin (such as "Eduardus" rather than the Norman "Edouardus") and include English place-names spelled in Anglo-Saxon orthography. Several scenes show details (the death of Edward the Confessor, the building of the ships) that match contemporary English accounts more closely than the Norman accounts. The workshop where the cloth was made was probably attached to one of the great Anglo-Saxon monastic houses. Canterbury, with St Augustine's Abbey and Christ Church Cathedral, is the most likely candidate. Both had active embroidery workshops in the late eleventh century. The Canterbury hypothesis is supported by the close stylistic relationship between the tapestry's figures and the figures in surviving Canterbury manuscripts of the same period. Who Commissioned It The patron was almost certainly Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. Odo was the half-brother of William the Conqueror and one of the central figures in the Norman conquest of England. He fought at Hastings, was made Earl of Kent by William, and held vast English estates from 1066 onward. He was also the political patron of his cathedral at Bayeux, where the tapestry was eventually housed. The case for Odo is circumstantial but strong. He had the resources to commission a work of this scale (an estimated 100,000 hours of embroidery labour). He had the political reason to celebrate the conquest. He had access to English workshops through his Kent earldom. And the tapestry's narrative gives Odo himself an unusually prominent role: he appears in three scenes, including one where he leads the Norman knights into battle at Hastings. What It Shows The narrative runs in fifty-eight scenes from left to right, with the Latin inscription above. The story begins with King Edward the Confessor in Westminster sending Harold Godwinson to Normandy in 1064. Harold sails across the Channel, is captured by Count Guy of Ponthieu, is ransomed by William of Normandy, fights alongside William in a Breton campaign, and (in a scene whose interpretation is still disputed) swears an oath on holy relics to support William's claim to the English throne. Harold then returns to England. King Edward dies in January 1066. Harold is crowned the next day. A comet appears (the work shows Halley's Comet, which actually appeared over England in April 1066). News reaches Normandy. William begins building ships. The Norman fleet sails. The army lands at Pevensey. The Battle of Hastings begins. The battle scenes (over half the surviving cloth) show the Norman cavalry charging the Anglo-Saxon shield-wall, the fighting at close range, and (at the end) the death of King Harold. The famous arrow-in-the-eye scene is here, though it has been recently re-interpreted: the arrow may not be hitting the eye, and the figure shown being hit by an arrow may not be Harold at all but a different soldier. The labelled "Harold" appears to be a slightly different figure, falling under the swords of mounted knights. Bayeux Tapestry, scenes 32-33: Halley's Comet appears over England in April 1066, watched by frightened Anglo-Saxons. The embroiderers have caught the comet in mid-flight, with the tail trailing across the linen cloth. What Is Missing The surviving cloth ends after the battle. The original almost certainly continued for several more scenes: the rout of the Anglo-Saxon survivors, the Norman march toward London, the coronation of William at Westminster on Christmas Day 1066. These scenes survive in summary form in the Latin chronicles of the conquest, but the embroidered version of them has been lost. The current end of the cloth is frayed and torn; some scholars estimate that as much as three metres of the original has been lost. The end may have been lost relatively early. The earliest surviving copy of the cloth (a 1729 antiquarian drawing) already shows the same ending we have today. The Lower Border Above and below the main narrative band, the cloth carries decorative borders of small animals, fantastical beasts, and (in places) small figural scenes. The upper border is mostly decorative. The lower border, particularly in the battle scenes, shows dead soldiers, looters stripping the dead, and severed limbs. The borders comment on the main action: while the inscribed narrative shows the dignified violence of the cavalry charge, the border shows the same violence at ground level, with corpses and looters. The borders also include several scenes that have been interpreted as moral commentary on the action. A fable of the fox and the crow appears in the border near the beginning, possibly suggesting that the diplomatic exchanges between Harold and William involved trickery on both sides. A scene of Aesop's wolf and lamb appears at a similarly sensitive moment. Why It Survived The tapestry was kept at Bayeux Cathedral from at least the twelfth century onward. It was displayed annually during the Feast of the Relics. It survived the cathedral fires of 1106 and 1142, possibly because it was stored in a separate building. It survived the French Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, when the cathedral was sacked but the tapestry was hidden by clerics. The closest the cloth came to destruction was during the French Revolution in 1792. A group of French national guards came to the cathedral to seize cloth for covering ammunition wagons. The tapestry was about to be cut up when a local lawyer, Lambert Léonard-Leforestier, intervened, arguing that the cloth was of antiquarian importance and should be preserved. The guards relented. Napoleon had the tapestry brought to Paris in 1803, where it was exhibited at the Louvre as part of the propaganda campaign for his planned (and then abandoned) invasion of England. It was returned to Bayeux in 1804 and kept in the cathedral until 1842, when it was moved to a public museum. The Museum The current display building, opened in 1983, contains the tapestry in a long curved corridor with controlled lighting and humidity. The cloth is mounted behind glass under low light to slow further fading. The Latin inscription has been provided in translation panels. Audio guides are available in twelve languages. The museum draws approximately 400,000 visitors a year. The cloth's planned move to a temporary display in the British Museum, announced and then postponed several times, has been a recurring point of Anglo-French cultural discussion since the 2018 visit of President Macron to London. The cloth, made in England and exhibited in France for nine hundred years, would return to England for the first time. As of 2026, the move remains under discussion but is not scheduled. The seventy metres of embroidered linen continue to do what they were made to do nearly a millennium ago: tell the story of a single year that changed the political, linguistic, and cultural history of England, with a narrative clarity that no later medium has equalled.