the academic tradition proved influential and helped to make cubism palatable to a wider public.
Seated Nude in Profile, c. 1923. Oil on canvas, 81 × 54 cm, Barry Friedman Ltd., New York.
Nude with Sailboats, 1931. Oil on canvas, 113 × 56.5 cm, Bruce R. Lewin Gallery, New York.
The Two Girlfriends, 1930. Oil on panel, 73 × 38 cm, Private Collection.
Nude on a Terrace, 1925. Oil on canvas, 37.8 × 54.5 cm, Private Collection.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Turkish Bath, 1862. Oil on canvas, diameter 108 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
If the artist de Lempicka did not spring to life fully formed and fully armed like Athena from the head of Zeus as she would have us believe, the gestation period of her mature art was remarkably short – lasting two or three years at most. Her Portrait of a Polo Player painted around 1922 already shows her predilection for the smart set but could otherwise have been painted by any competent artist trained in Paris in these years. It has a looseness of touch and a painterly quality that would soon disappear from her work. The modelling of the face in bold structural brush strokes shows an awareness of Cezanne that would undoubtedly have been encouraged by both Denis and Lhote. Similarly lush and painterly is the portrait of Ira Perrot later re-titled Portrait of a young Lady in a Blue Dress. In its original form, as exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and photographed at the time with the model in front of it, it showed Ira Perrot seated cross-legged in front of cushions piled up exotically in the manner of Bakst’s Sheherazade designs.
More prophetic both stylistically and in subject matter than these two portraits is another canvas of the same period entitled The Kiss. The erotic theme, played out against an urban back-drop, the element of cubist stylisation that gives the picture an air of modernity and dynamism and the metallic sheen on the gentleman’s top hat all anticipate de Lempicka’s artistic maturity. The crudeness of the technique is as yet far from the enamelled perfection of her best work. Naivety is not in general a quality we associate with de Lempicka but this picture has the look of a cover for a lurid popular novel.
The following year we find de Lempicka working on a series of large scale and monumental female nudes that might be described as cubified rather than cubist. These works reflect an interest in the classical and the monumental that was widespread in western art following the First World War and throughout the inter-war period.
The entire history of western art from the Ancient world onwards can be seen in terms of a series of major and minor classical revivals. In an essay of 1926 entitled The Call to Order, Jean Cocteau presented the post-war return to classicism as a necessary reaction to the chaos of radical experimentation during the anarchic decade that had preceded the First World War. There was undoubtedly some element of truth in this, though the roots of inter-war classicism can be traced back much further.
Rhythm, 1924. Oil on canvas, 160 × 144 cm, Private Collection.
The Blue Hour, 1931. Oil on canvas, 55 × 38 cm, Private Collection.
Maurice Denis, The Vengeance of Venus.Psyche Falls Asleep after Opening the CasketContaining the Dreams of the Underworld, 1907. Oil on canvas, 395 × 272 cm, Hermitage St Petersburg.
A specifically French version of classicism can be seen as a continuing thread in French art running back as far as Poussin in the seventeenth century. The classicist most often cited in connection with de Lempicka is the nineteenth century painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867). The taste for hard, bright colours and enamelled surfaces, the combination of abstraction and quasi-photographic realism, the eroticising of the female body through the radical distortion of anatomy and the love of luxurious and fashionable accessories link the female portraits of Ingres and de Lempicka. Baudelaire’s bitchy comment that Ingres’ ideal was “A provocative, adulterous liaison between the calm solidity of Raphael and the affectations of the fashion plate” could apply equally well to de Lempicka, What is perhaps more surprising is the way de Lempicka follows Ingres’ example in treating women as passive sex objects. Like Ingres she shows virtually no interest in the individual psychology or personality of her female sitters. De Lempicka’s female nudes are still more closely linked to Ingres. Her chained and swooning Andromeda with her upturned eyes and head thrown further back than anatomy should allow, against a cubified urban backdrop, is clearly an updated version of Ingres’ Angelica. Her groups of female nudes piled up like inflatable dolls, descend from Ingres’ notorious Turkish Bath.
Ingres’ reputation enjoyed a considerable revival in the inter-war period with the two giants of modern painting, Picasso and Matisse, each paying homage to him in their different ways. Another nineteenth century painter who was significant for the classical revival was Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898). In the 1870s just as impressionism, that most nonclassical of styles, was in full bloom, Puvis de Chavannes was developing through a series of monumental murals (often referred to as fresques but painted in oil on canvas) a style that attempted to embody the timeless qualities of classicism without falling into the cliches of the academic art on show at the Paris Salon. Puvis de Chavannes was a hero to the Nabis group. Denis would undoubtedly have urged his students including de Lempicka to follow Puvis’ example. Denis’ fellow Nabi Eduard Vuillard (1868–1940) wrote “The experiments in stylisation and in expressive synthesis of form which are typical of today’s art were all present in the art of Puvis.”
The crisis of confidence suffered by all the impressionists to a greater or lesser degree in the 1880s caused Renoir to turn back to the classical tradition. A trip to Italy from 1881 to 1882 during which he studied Roman wall painting and the Renaissance masters, prompted Renoir to look with renewed interest at Ingres, an artist hitherto regarded as an anathema by most artists of the Impressionist group. In the mid 1880s, Renoir developed a hard-edged style that in turn gave way to the softer but volumetric and monumental style of his later years that had considerable impact on the classicising painters and sculptors of the inter-war period. It was the simple lines and large sculptural volumes of Renoir’s late nudes that encouraged Aristide Maillol to break with the pathos and “unsculptural” qualities of Rodin’s expressively modelled sculptures. The key work for the re-launching of a monumental classical style in twentieth century sculpture was Maillol’s La Méditerranée modelled in 1902 and exhibited in bronze in 1905 in the very same Salon d’Automne that saw the controversial debut of the Fauve group. It could be argued that Maillol’s monumental neo-neo-classicism had a longer lasting impact on western art than the spectacular but short lived Fauve movement which could be seen as a glorious coda to the nineteenth century but something of a dead end. It was unfortunate for Maillol’s reputation and indirectly for a while at least for de Lempicka’s that Maillol’s best known pupil was Hitler’s favourite sculptor Arno Breker and that the kind of monumental classicism pioneered by Maillol and practised by de Lempicka became so closely associated with totalitarian regimes of the 1930s.
The return to classicism regarded by some followers as a betrayal and even a blasphemous provocation was given the stamp of approval by the king of the Parisian avant-garde Pablo Picasso. As early as 1914 (thus well before there was any question of reaction to the consequences of the war) Picasso began toying with some aspects of classicism, making portrait drawings based on photographs in a hard linear Ingresque style. A good example is the portrait of the art-dealer Léonce Rosenberg made in 1915, that is very reminiscent of the kind of drawings Ingres made of tourists in post Napoleonic Italy. Though de Lempicka was scathing about Picasso, paintings such as the Seated Nude of 1923 depicting a woman with colossal thighs and sculptural breasts, show a clear awareness of Picasso’s work – both the primitivism of the early analytical cubist phase and the gigantic neo-classical female figures of the post war period.
In the close