Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation by Judith Mackrell Read Free Book Online Page A

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    Tamara’s mantra that ‘it is an artist’s duty to try everything’ was a cliché of Left Bank life, yet for her it had a visceral reality. The more squalid or precarious her sexual encounters, the more liberating she found them. They gave her a release from the rigid structure of her daytime life and the ambitions she’d set herself. Yet even in the random intoxication of these late-night encounters, Tamara’s painterly vision was still at work. She retained a powerful sense memory of the strangers with whom she had sex: the hard or ripe texture of their flesh, the shape of their bodies. They were all potential material and when she returned home she would sometimes stay up painting until the last of her sexual and chemical adrenalin was expended, converting the sensations of the night into brush strokes and colour. Sometimes she would snatch only a couple of hours’ sleep before it was time to wake Kizette for breakfast. Decades later Tamara would recall that she had ‘started from nothing’ with a determination to achieve ‘the best of everything’. 17 By 1924, she believed she was getting close to her aim.

 
    Chapter Eleven
    TAMARA
    During the first two years of Zelda’s illness, she wrote down long therapeutic accounts of her life, trying to understand what had happened to her. In some versions she blamed her breakdown on Scott, his drinking, his self-involvement and – above all – his failure to support her creative aspirations. ‘Horrible things have happened to me,’ she wrote, ‘through my inability to express myself.’ 1
    There were many occasions when Tamara de Lempicka, too, had accused her husband of being drunk and insensitive, but never once had she let him interfere with her art. By the mid-1920s the arguments between her and Tadeusz had escalated into an operatic violence as he berated her selfishness and greed and she dismissed him as an embittered failure. One night she returned to the flat to find him riled up to an exceptional, drunken self-righteousness: she was a whore, a bad mother, a lousy wife. A few years earlier he would have used his fists as well his tongue to abuse her, but Tamara had long taken control of their arguments. When Kizette awoke to the sound of shouting, and crept out of bed to observe her mother emerging from the kitchen with a knife in her hand. As Tamara began to chase Tadeusz round the apartment. Kizette was convinced that her father only escaped serious injury by darting into the lift in the corridor outside.
    It incensed Tamara that Tadeusz should dare to accuse her of selfishness. She was beginning to receive important commissions and her paintings were starting to sell. She saw herself as the saviour of the Lempicki family, raising them out of their humiliating dependency on her relatives. Beyond the good she had done her husband and daughter, she also regarded herself as an important painter – and as such above reproach.
    Kizette had long learned to accept Tamara’s mantra. Her mother, her Cherie, ‘was an artist always, before anything else.’ She had accepted that most of the time she would be cared for by her grandmother Malvina, while Tamara was walled inside the ferocious concentration of her painting. She learned to treasure the occasional days when Cherie left her easel and announced that they would take a walk in the Bois de Boulogne, a trip to the open-air skating rink at the Palais de Glace or even a rare holiday. But when Tamara was on vacation, Kizette still accepted that her mother never stopped thinking about her work.
    During one trip to Italy, Tamara, Kizette and Malvina were eating lunch in a restaurant in Rome when Tamara suddenly halted the conversation. She was struck by the quality of the sunlight as it slanted through the window and onto their checked tablecloth. Needing to see its effect more clearly she swept aside their plates of food, sending antipasti flying, and snapped imperiously to the startled diner opposite to