.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Lempicka began to publicly exhibit her paintings in the Salon d'Automne and Salon des Tuileries in 1922. She took advantage of the growing interest in women who were entering the arts following the First World War, and indeed, she strongly believed that she stood out among them. Lempicka later wrote, "I was the first woman who did clear painting-- and that was the success of my painting. Among a hundred paintings, you could recognize mine. And the galleries began to put me in the best rooms, always in the center, because my painting attracted people. It was neat, it was finished" (quoted in K. de Lempicka-Foxhall, op. cit., p. 53).
Lempicka's teachers had been Maurice Denis, the Nabi painter who turned to the Italian quattrocento in the early years of the century, and André Lhote, the cubist who followed the "call to order" following the war and worked within the ethos of the new classicism. Lempicka learned from Denis the value of precise draftsmanship and acquired an affinity for the Italian primitives, whose work she studied during her 1925 stay in Italy. She took from Lhote the principle of the "plastic metaphor," in which the shapes and volumes of the human form were based on abstract, geometric forms. Lhote had admired this idealized approach in the work of Ingres, and Lempicka was likewise drawn to this tendency, which expressed the clarity she sought in her work.
The classical spirit and example of Ingres, namely his final masterpiece, Le bain turc (fig. 1), inspired Lempicka's Groupe de quatre nus. Ingres' harem picture, stocked with nudes in intimate proximity to each other, for subsequent artists, Picasso among them, in the ways it depicted the female figure in various poses and multi-figure combinations. Of the present painting Germain Bazin has written: "I know of no other work so akin to "The Turkish Bath" by Ingres than this group of nudes, where every inch of canvas is devoted to flesh. Lempicka's lines are Ingres-like in their sensualism, as are her contours and colors" (quoted in A. Blondel, op. cit.).
Lempicka's timely and fashionable reference to Ingres helped fuel interest in her work, and, indeed, it attracted no small element of notoriety. The critic Arsène Alexandre, having seen Lempicka's work in the 1926 Salon des Indépendents, commented on what he called the artist's "perverse Ingrism" (quoted in K. de Lempicka-Foxhall, op. cit., p. 53). This remark might equally apply to the present painting, and be understood in terms of Lempicka's modernist, post-cubist reworking of Ingres' hallowed classicism, and more strikingly, the ferociously Amazonian character of her female models. Lempicka has completely divested her subjects of their traditional Ingresque relationship to the secluded and passively kept odalisque of the seraglio. Lempicka's physically robust, short-haired women project themselves as being personally empowered and aggressively sexual, and the scene carries strong hints of lesbianism. It recalls a soirée at the home of a lesbian model whom Lempicka had befriended, as described by Laura Claridge: "The women at the party went off in pairs or threesomes into the corners of the room. Tamara engaged in her infamous routine of arranging food on the naked body of a woman, this time her hostess, and slowly eating her midnight meal" (in op. cit., p. 121).
(fig. 1) J.A.D. Ingres, Le bain turc, 1863. Musée de Louvre, Paris. BARCODE 24771375
Lempicka's teachers had been Maurice Denis, the Nabi painter who turned to the Italian quattrocento in the early years of the century, and André Lhote, the cubist who followed the "call to order" following the war and worked within the ethos of the new classicism. Lempicka learned from Denis the value of precise draftsmanship and acquired an affinity for the Italian primitives, whose work she studied during her 1925 stay in Italy. She took from Lhote the principle of the "plastic metaphor," in which the shapes and volumes of the human form were based on abstract, geometric forms. Lhote had admired this idealized approach in the work of Ingres, and Lempicka was likewise drawn to this tendency, which expressed the clarity she sought in her work.
The classical spirit and example of Ingres, namely his final masterpiece, Le bain turc (fig. 1), inspired Lempicka's Groupe de quatre nus. Ingres' harem picture, stocked with nudes in intimate proximity to each other, for subsequent artists, Picasso among them, in the ways it depicted the female figure in various poses and multi-figure combinations. Of the present painting Germain Bazin has written: "I know of no other work so akin to "The Turkish Bath" by Ingres than this group of nudes, where every inch of canvas is devoted to flesh. Lempicka's lines are Ingres-like in their sensualism, as are her contours and colors" (quoted in A. Blondel, op. cit.).
Lempicka's timely and fashionable reference to Ingres helped fuel interest in her work, and, indeed, it attracted no small element of notoriety. The critic Arsène Alexandre, having seen Lempicka's work in the 1926 Salon des Indépendents, commented on what he called the artist's "perverse Ingrism" (quoted in K. de Lempicka-Foxhall, op. cit., p. 53). This remark might equally apply to the present painting, and be understood in terms of Lempicka's modernist, post-cubist reworking of Ingres' hallowed classicism, and more strikingly, the ferociously Amazonian character of her female models. Lempicka has completely divested her subjects of their traditional Ingresque relationship to the secluded and passively kept odalisque of the seraglio. Lempicka's physically robust, short-haired women project themselves as being personally empowered and aggressively sexual, and the scene carries strong hints of lesbianism. It recalls a soirée at the home of a lesbian model whom Lempicka had befriended, as described by Laura Claridge: "The women at the party went off in pairs or threesomes into the corners of the room. Tamara engaged in her infamous routine of arranging food on the naked body of a woman, this time her hostess, and slowly eating her midnight meal" (in op. cit., p. 121).
(fig. 1) J.A.D. Ingres, Le bain turc, 1863. Musée de Louvre, Paris. BARCODE 24771375