Tamara de Lempicka, Les Jeunes Filles

Tamara de Lempicka, Les Jeunes Filles, c 1930, oil on panel, private collection

The paintings made by Tamara de Lempicka, particularly those done in the 1920s and ‘30s, speak of the primacy of gesture, and often show figures in the act of attitudinizing, projecting what today we might call ‘front’. It’s not surprising that Madonna, a performer whose hugely successful career has been built on the idea of conscious, deliberate and performative affectation, is an avid collector of her works and that some of them feature in the opening frames of the video for her song Vogue. Nor is it accidental that Lempicka’s works have been used repeatedly by haute couture fashion houses to connect their creations in the mind of their audience with the apotheosis of the idea of a ‘look’. The striking of a pose is what Lempicka chose to depict, the projection of images of steely live-for-the-moment beautiful people, people who were rich and connected and whose surface gloss and glamour was reflected in paint by highly stylised levels of finish. Those who modelled for Lempicka were shown in ways which brought the very idea of the model (in the sense of exemplar) to the fore and relegated any character or personality that might lie behind their masks. What they gesture, in my eyes, is a kind of will-to-power aesthetic that can sometimes look fascistic (Lempicka herself was not a fascist supporter, even if she flirted with celebrities such as the poet-prophet Gabriel d'Annunzio, who played John the Baptist to Mussolini)  in their promotion of figures as idealised super heroic archetypes rather than as living and breathing flawed bodies. In this period, Lempicka was not interested in the physically suboptimal (an attitude that was to change later) and produced pictures that above all spoke of her worship of beauty and her desire to mould and control it.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque, 1814, oil on canvas, The Louvre, Paris.

She was clearly an artist of her time and is sometimes bracketed with the Art Deco

movement. The period between the wars was the heyday of this style, where angularity and streamlining were de rigueur as was an inclination to opulence and luxury. Deco was thought intensely modern, a break from the perceived fustiness of the nineteenth century and its sibling contemporary art movements Futurism and Vorticism were clearly influential on Lempicka’s style too. Art Deco also abounded in nudes, as did Lempicka’s art – there was a shamelessness to this, or rather, a celebratory appreciation of the (mostly female) form that Lempicka responded to with apparent lubricious longing. But although we can agree with her own estimation of her work, that it is instantly recognisable (and could not be anyone else’s), I think that an early critic’s description of her as having the qualities of a ‘perverse Ingres’ is particularly telling. A neoclassicist, Ingres’ highly finished paintings, with their hard sheen and their idealisation and deformation of bodies that subordinated verisimilitude in favour of physiologically impossible yet sinuously sensual forms, were characteristic of Lempicka’s work too.

We also know that she admired Mannerist Italian Renaissance artists such as Bronzino, whose showcasing of elegance, opulence and above all style, meant that his paintings could look artificial – indeed, that was their point. He wasn’t concerned with realism warts-and-all, but with rhapsodising and immortalising his subjects.

Bronzino, Eleanor of Toledo and her Son, c 1545, oil on canvas, Uffizi, Florence.

Les Jeunes Filles, a work which sold for more than $5m a few years ago, testimony to the value collectors place on her best work, is a good example of these dual influences and perhaps, to the ‘perversity’ alluded to above (we would favour less judgmental adjectives today). The identity of the models isn’t recorded as far as I can tell, but its depiction of two female ‘types’ is provocative. One, a blue-eyed blond leans into her friend adopting a slightly subordinate position. She looks away, unfocusedly. The other, an amber-eyed redhead, gazes towards the viewer, knowingly, almost confrontationally. Both are unsmiling, both have attitude.  Showing these tightly cropped faces in intimate proximity, is suggestive of a same-sex relationship which was considered daring at the time. Their languid, half-closed eyes make them appear narcotized but could just as readily connote desire. The painting reminds me of some of the images of the 1930s ‘bad girl’ actress Jean Harlow who was considered the major sex symbol of the age, or maybe the bisexual Marlene Dietrich.

Marlene Dietrich

Jean Harlow

The mouths of both figures are painted with an enamel-like vermillion lipstick, and the beautiful planar symmetry of their flawless faces makes them look like latter-day biomechanical synths whose hair might have been cybernetically fashioned from spiralized metal shavings. A loosely knotted turquoise scarf, perhaps the essential fashion accessory of the period, drapes from one figure across to the other so that they share in the sensuousness of its touch. It dominates the lower half of the picture while its colour is reflected on two of the visible facades of one of the skyscrapers at top right. One of Lempicka’s teachers, the cubist painter André Lhote, used this technique of ‘plastic rhymes’ to lead the eye by colour repetition from one area of the picture to another and it is the dominance of the luxury silk of the scarf and its association with the high-rise that contributes to the painting’s sense of materialistic exigency.

These towering buildings situate the girls in a sophisticated, cosmopolitan world, exemplifying the dernier cri in their style, their attitude, their manufactured presence. By association, they also underline the architectonic qualities of the figures themselves. These are girls who are shaped for their environment, reflective of the live-for-now values of their times. These are also girls who don’t care what we think of them; they are far too modish for that! The relative scale of buildings and figures lends a monumentality to the girls, a dominant presence that is unignorable.

Les Jeunes Filles is undoubtedly a highly technically accomplished painting. Lempicka’s draughtsmanship and superfine brushstrokes, combined with a superb eye for compositional balance, make this and similar works from her oeuvre highly seductive. The way that the arrangement of the heads flows from top left downwards towards bottom right, and how the voluptuous folds and deep shadows of the scarf following the same trajectory is then counterbalanced by the cubist buildings, is masterly.

But although perhaps unintentional on the part of the artist, the emotion engendered in me by this painting is one of apprehension. Behind the figures’ synthetic smouldering sultriness lies an idea of vulnerability. These girls are jeunes, but they are also jejune, and their lives are as brittle and precarious, like supporting characters from The Great Gatsby. They inhabit a new, modern world, in which technological innovation and changes to social codes of behaviour were moving at a dizzying, hard-to-keep-up with pace, but where disaster was never far from view. The Wall Street crash happened in 1929 – fortunes were lost, lives ruined, and the great depression was just around the corner. The ‘front’ and gloss that masks insecurity makes them emblematic of the age they lived in and maybe of ours too.