THE TRUE STORY OF TAMARA DE LEMPICKA AND THE ART OF SURVIVAL (Julie Rubio 2024)

[Chris Knipp]

JULIE RUBIO: THE TRUE STORY OF TAMARA DE LEMPICKA AND THE ART OF SURVIVAL (2024)

Does the art of Tamara de Lempicka deserve greater recognition?

The first few minutes of this film include the announcement that Tamara de Lempicka is one of the great European portraitists of the twentieth century, and that she's underappreciated. A Christie's auction sale is shown in which a painting by de Lampika goes for $5 million, a sign that things are turning around. She's also described as a representative of women's liberation or what is now called "the female gaze" (very female or not-so-female, depending how you see her bisexual, lesbian point of view). A big exhibition of her work is currently showing in San Francisco at the De Young Museum. This year a Broadway musical was mounted celebrating her. This film does everything it can to promote the importance of the art of Tamara de Lempicka, an effort of benefit to experts, dealers, and museum directors who want the artist's work to become more admired. Many talking heads, often people with a stake in the desired success come forward, and the film showers us with images of the paintings, often multiplied over and over in a single frame or in tricky arrangements. But while as a standard documentary biopic, this haas some interest, the claim that this is a great, neglected artist fails to convince.

Shes being brought out again. But there are reasons why her work doesn't appeal and has not been in the foreground of museum art. A Guardian piece by Fiona MacCarthy 20 years ago to introduce a show, "Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon" at the Royal Academy, clarifies. MacCarthy makes a bold declaration. She starts out by saying "In life Tamara de Lempicka was a Left Bank bisexual with an appetite for bohemian living. Her work, though, portrays the dubious glamour and discipline of fascism." MacCarthy notes the artist's style of combining traditional portraiture "astutely" with "advertising techniques," as well as "photographic lighting," and backgrounds with "vistas of the tower architecture of great cities." The film has no inkling of this. It's a revelation.

MacCarthy doesn't explain what she means by "advertising techniques" or "photographic lighting" and her piece is a bit slick and sensational (like De Lempicka herself), the way she says the artist "lived and worked" on the "bisexual fringes of a society" where "there were no rules beyond the demands of style and entertainment." But we get it: it's hard to pin this artist down. She made up her name, and when she was born, and it's not clear if her birthplace was Moscow or Warsaw, as MacCarthy says. She married an aristocratic Polish lawyer in Russia when very young. They escaped and went to live in Paris, and there she remained for the best of her art career, till, being part Jewish, she had to flee to America with World War II.

Her poverty in Paris, and the idleness of her aristocratic husband, motivated Tamara, who had shown talent very early, to work hard to succeed as an artist. She studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière (and admired Bronzino) and studied with the artist Maurice Denis, but was most influenced by the well known, if second rank, André Lhote and a toned-down cubism to which she added sensualism and provocation, lots of female nudity and women stroking each other's thighs. (The film, in its breathless admiration and chatty anecdotal history, doesn't go much into the style, or describe it.) Provocative style plus hard work and self promotion led to exhibitions in small galleries for de Lempicka by 1923, then inclusion in the Salon des Femmes Artistes Modernes in Paris (thereby takng a stand as a woman artrist), and in 1925 a debut solo show in Milan. (This early career is not described in the film.)

Then came rich patrons like Pierre Boucard, the creator of Lacteol, the indigestion cure, who bought a lesbian nude painting called Myrto, Two Women on a Couch, long stolen but still remembered. Boucard gave De Lempicka a lucrative contract that allowed her to buy a nice house on the Left Bank and have it decorated in the deco style. (Nothing about all this in the film.)

De Lempicka's paintings are like very graphic, very stylish advertising art or commercial illustration. (This is me talking, of course, not the film.) They have a slickness that makes them feel shallow. They can be dazzling, and cloying and also glitteringly ugly, often frightening. (There is not much about individual paintings in the film.)

And her work can be very repetitious, as the film's constant background of reproductions often vividly shows. The nudes, though a little generic, are the strongest and most enthusiastic works. Other paintings, like Lempicka's portrait of Grand Duke Gavriil Constantinovich, with its elaborate dazzlingly red military uniform, are like flashy designs for theatrical costumes (though one might long for the delicacy of a true theatrical designer of the period like Leon Bakst.)

While de Lempicka's paintings are dramatic, assured, and accomplished, what they are not is work that can be considered artistically significant. Fiona MacCarthy also points out in her Guardian piece that it after all isin't altogether consistent, since it sometimes gives way to "mawkishness: cubism or kitsch." The portraits follow the European aristocracy and, she says, are allied to the "call to order" movement, the return to monumental realism in European art; Her art "exudes the dark and dubious glamour of authoritarian discipline." This explains the unease it produces: it has the confident glow of fascism.

When De Lempicka remarried "up" in 1933 to the very rich land owner Baron Raoul Kuffner, she lost the success-drive poverty had given her. (This is not acknowledged in the film.) She and the Baron escaped fascism in the USA and then Mexico. She lived and acted grandly, swooshing to a Houston art supplies store in a limo in a wave of cigarette smoke and self importance, as her folksy-voiced 1973-74 Houston studio assistant Nancy Couch, the most touching speaker, who reports a lesbian love affair, tells us in the film, but, though the film never overtly acknowledges this, the art work she was doing in America just didn't cut it any more. She shone in that deco Paris moment. After that she never found a niche.

The documentary, The Story of Tamara de Lempicka and the Art of Survival is promotional and uncritical. It features Matt Gould, composer of a musical, Lempica, who hypes her as a heroine of the disadvantaged. Roxana Valesqez hypes her as simply the best modern art has to offer. Then her granddaughter and great-granddaughter come in to provide more personal details, such as that her father disappeared from her well off family when she was quite young and that she had to compete for attention with older siblings. Furio Rinaldi, a curator of the De Lempicka retrospective at theDe Young Museum in San Francisco, speaks repeatedly. He says that even contemporaries who didn't like her work appreciated the "strength and power" of Tamara de Lempicka's draftsmanship. This is true: it's as confident as a "how to draw" book. Underneath the boldness of the images there is a sturdy academic conventionality in the drawing. Perhaps her great flaw is that she never transcended the drawing.

Paula Birnbaum of the University of San Francisco and Roland Weinstein, a gallerist and collector, enter to say de Lempicka would have been better treated if she had been a man and therefore (despite her well-off background and wealthy patrons) deserves more credit as a woman striving against adversity. Carson Kreitzzer, creator of the Lempicka musical, enthuses about how driven the artist was. These speakers help to promote Lempicka to the general public for events like the San Francisco exhibition. Scott Nichel, head of auctions at Sotheby's, on the other hand can be seen as promoting her as an item whose market value is rising, and presents her as the epitome of glamor, since she was compared to Greta Garbo and Bette Davis, a link in which she herself took pride.

This film has more information about de Lempicka's life in America, and inadvertently shown that she was not the artist she once was after leaving Paris, and the valuation of her work went down. Rowland Weinstein is happy to report that a painting of hers has now sold at auction for $20 million. Georgia O'Keefe is the only woman artist whose work has sold for more. And now being a time of "reckoning," as one talkng head says, when woke thinking requires affirmative action for art by women or people of color, there's another reason to emphasize Tamara de Lempicka.

A need to promote fills nearly every frame of this documentary, which never presents critical views of the work or speculates as to why it has been less appreciated than they would like. Maybe it's because the extra value they seek in the work just isn't there. Of course tastes change. But the comparison of a de Lempicka to Vermeer's Girl with Pearl Earring is a real howler.

The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka and the Art of Survival, 195 mins., premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival Oct. 11, 2024. Screening Oct. 25 at Roxie Theater with Julie Rubio present.