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

get out of her line of vision: ‘There is an unforgettable light coming through the window opposite. Please move, monsieur, so that I can study [it].’ 2
    Tamara’s addiction to her work was genuine. She sought to capture the perfect image no less intently than Zelda sought to master the perfect jump or the perfect balance in the ballet studio. But she also wanted to be judged by the same standards as a man. Picasso and the other male painters in Paris all took mistresses and lived as they chose – their behaviour justified in the name of art. Tamara believed it was her right, even her duty, to claim the same freedom.
    The further she progressed with her career, the more conscious she became of the battle to hold her professional ground. Unlike Marie Laurencin, who’d had the support of her lover Apollinaire, or Emilie Charmy with Matisse as a mentor, she lacked powerful male allies. Nor could she claim membership of a politically influential group, such as the surrealists. As a painter of portraits she earned good money, and she was acknowledged to have a perceptively original eye. In her 1923 portrait of André Gide, Tamara stylized the writer’s features into an almost tribal mask of intelligence, his eyes two black glittering slits in the carved planes of his face. In the 1927 portrait of her friend the exiled Grand Duke Gabriel Constantinovich, she caught a combination of nobility and dissolution that was both arrestingly personal yet profoundly evocative of the Grand Duke’s class. But however impressive Tamara’s achievements, there were those in the art world who regarded commercial portraiture as a hangover from the past, almost irrelevant to the great modernist enterprise of European painting. As a genre it earned her little status.
    There was one movement to which Tamara would later become very profitably affiliated – art deco or art moderne * – but in 1925 deco was regarded principally as a movement within commercial design. Its name was taken from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, which had opened in Paris in April that year. Its exhibits ranged from furniture and kitchen equipment to clothes and architectural design, and it proffered the vision of a shiny, confident lifestyle, tailor-made to the post-war era. Products came in bold colours and efficient, geometric forms, they radiated a cosmopolitan assurance in their fusion of cultural and historic references – a radio shaped like an Aztec pyramid, a bourgeois dinner service patterned with an African tribal motif. Few of the visitors who crowded into the exhibition could afford to build a deco villa like the Murphys and live the full deco lifestyle, but most had the money to buy themselves a small piece of it – a chrome coffee pot, a scallop-edged powder compact, or a bevelled bottle of perfume.
    The connections between Tamara’s painting and the deco aesthetic would later become very obvious: in 1978 she would even claim that she had been a prime mover in deco, dating it from her own 1925 painting, Irene and her Sister, and referring to it as the greatest of her achievements. But at the time it was of little use as a platform for her work, and in order to push her career forward she was casting round for some kind of external sponsorship and support. The salons where she had already been exhibited – the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants – had shown her work to a large public. But within the Parisian art world, power had begun to shift to the smaller independent galleries, and by 1925 Tamara needed to find one that would nurture her own career.
    Her instinct was to look beyond the crowded marketplace of Paris. On the way home from her Italian holiday with Kizette and Malvina, she broke her journey in Milan to visit the wealthy collector Count Emanuele Castelbarco. Later she would spin this meeting as a spur-of-the-moment encounter between a nervous young artist and a formidable