Lempicka. Patrick Bade

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      One of the most iconic images of the Jazz Age and perhaps de Lempicka’s most frequently reproduced picture is the self-portrait at the wheel of an open-topped Bugatti sports car in de Lempicka’s favourite “poison green”, commissioned by the German Fashion magazine Die Dame in 1925. The tight driver’s helmet that masks her permed blond hair and makes her look more like an aviator than a motorist, and her cool impervious stare characterise her as a thoroughly independent and self-confident modern woman. Like the sewing machine and the type-writer in the previous generation (that provided employment however humble inside and outside the home), the motor car contributed significantly to the emancipation of women, if only those at the upper end of the economic scale.

      De Lempicka monogrammed this picture with her initials, looking like an industrial logo on the door of the car. Throughout the Art Deco period de Lempicka showed her allegiance to the machine aesthetic by signing her pictures in printed letters that look like industrial typeface in contrast to the flowing calligraphy favoured by the more painterly artists of the Belle Epoque.

      As Arsène Alexandre suggested, de Lempicka’s modernity also lay in her combination of coolness and sensuality and a certain ambiguity. Though he is too discreet to spell it out, this ambiguity was sexual.

      Amongst the value systems that had been thrown into question by the unparalleled catastrophe of the First World War were traditional concepts of gender. The 1920s in Paris might be termed a heroic age of Lesbianism. Back in the nineteenth century when Queen Victoria reputedly denied the existence of lesbianism, it flourished in the brothels of Paris, if we are to believe the clandestine guide-books produced for English speaking sex tourists to the City of Light. In 193 °Colette began publishing a series of essays in the Parisian weekly Gringoire that were eventually collected and published in book form under the title of The Pure and the Impure, in which she revealed the shadowy life of well-healed lesbians in the early years of the century. Though the initial run of articles was interrupted, apparently in response to negative responses, the very fact that such a well-known and respected author could publish such material showed the profound change of attitudes towards homosexuality and lesbianism that had taken place since the First World War. The war itself had much to do with this. When millions of young men departed for the slaughter of the western Front, women were forced into new roles and many were released from domestic slavery. After the war there was no turning back. Changing roles were reflected in the changing appearance of women – bobbed hair and la ligne à la mode – boyish figures with flattened breasts and narrow hips. Throughout the western world popular songs such as Masculine men and feminine women or Eh! Ah! Maria! T’est’y une fille ou bien un gars? and Hannelore (with her pretty boys haircut and smoking jacket who has “a bridegroom and a bride” in Claire Waldoff’s song) mocked or celebrated the new androgynous look. Berlin was the capital in which traditional sexual mores and gender roles broke down most spectacularly. According to Stefan Zweig “Berlin transformed itself into the Babel of the world. Bars, amusement parks and pubs shot up like mushrooms – made up boys with artificial waistlines promenaded along the Kurfurstendam – and not only the professionals. Every high school pupil wanted to make some money and in the darkened bars one could see high public officials and financiers courting drunken sailors without shame. Even the Rome of Suetonius had not known orgies like Berlin’s Transvestite balls. Amid the general collapse of values, a kind of insanity took hold of precisely those middle-class circles which had hitherto been unshakable in their order. Young ladies proudly boasted that they were perverted. To be suspected of virginity at the age of sixteen would have been considered a disgrace in every school in Berlin.” If Berlin was notorious for its transvestite balls, Paris was undoubtedly the lesbian capital of the world in the 1920s. The relative acceptance of lesbianism in inter-war Paris allowed for the opening of well-known lesbian night spots such as Le Monocle and sympathetic and even glamorous representations of lesbians in French movies such as Symphonie Pathétique in 1928 and La Garçonne in 1936. This tolerance attracted to Paris creative and unconventional women from all over the world. Gertrude Stein and Alice B.Toklas and Nathalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, the best known Parisian lesbian couples had been in the city from before the war and they were joined there in the 1920s by the novelist Djuna Barnes, the journalist Janet Flanner, Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the famous English language bookshop Shakespeare and Co. De Lempicka dismissed Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway as “boring people who wanted to be what they were not. He wanted to be a woman and she wanted to be a man.” She did attend the salon of Nathalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, but with her frivolous and somewhat snobbish hedonism it is difficult to imagine de Lempicka attending book readings at Adrienne Monnier’s La Maison des Amis des Livres or contributing much to the feminist or lesbian intellectual life of Paris. Long before the term was invented, de Lempicka might have been described as a “Lipstick lesbian.” However she did take her role as a woman artist seriously enough to exhibit with the group FAM (Femmes Artistes Modernes) in the 1930s.