Kara Wilson in Deco Diva
A portrayal of the artist,
Tamara de Lempicka (1898 - 1980)
In Words, Music and Oil Paint.
At: Phillips Auction House
Old King Street, (off Queen Square)
Saturday 29th, Sunday 30th, &
Monday 31st May. 6pm - 7.10pm
Kara Wilson stepped into Tamara de Lempicka for an interview with the outrageous Polish artist of the 1920's.
Tamara entered the room, addressing the audience for an
interview.
....
"I have to paint for my sanity!...I need peace, I need to paint. I
could always loose myself into my painting and disappear into my
work."
Tamara went to work on the portrait of Raphaella.... "Raphaella, I
could paint her by heart, my beautiful Raphaella. She was the most
beautiful woman I had ever seen".
( Tamara saw her one day and asked her
to sit for her, she fell in love with her beauty and painted her
continuously for over a year).
A shout goes out to her
servant, "Put some music on!" Gently, Chopin flowed out from the room
beyond
"Restful but inspiring...is she trying to drown me in
nostalgia! This is the first song I ever learned". Tamara explained.
"I used to play
Chopin on the piano...no matter how hard I worked, I would always be
repeating someone else's work. So I shut the lid!"
Tamara was brought
up in Warsaw, sent away to boarding school and sent to live with her
aunt in St. Petersburg, where she acquired her aunts rich style of
living.
"She had one drawer for diamonds...one drawer for rubies..and
one drawer for emeralds."
Tamara vowed to make her life as rich as her
aunts.
The war between Germany and Russia broke out and Tamara fell in love
with a young lawyer, to impress him at her aunt's costume ball, she
went as a Polish Goose Girl, complete with a live goose,
"Needless to
say he couldn't fail but to notice me." and eventually she married him.
After the war, Tamara and her husband went to Paris where
she learnt to paint. She went to art school, and
was exposed to all types of painting, but to her, decorative painting
was the only style.
Then in 1925, Art Deco was born. Art Deco concentrated very much on
the surface of things.
"I was in the right place at the right time.
I vowed that each time I sold a painting, I would buy myself
a new bracelet....soon I had bracelets up to my elbow! Jewels
started to mount up my arm".
Her passion for painting and choice of
lifestyle irritated her husband immensely. Soon commissions were
flooding in, and she was invited by many rich men to stay and paint
for them. Tamara painted a large portrait of her husband, but he said
"I'd slept with everyone I'd painted"
It was one row too many
they divorced and he moved out of her life.
She took another apartment, decorated in fine Art Deco style, people
started to collect her work. She bumped into an American who invited
her to New York to paint a portrait of his girlfriend. It turned out
that he was a millionaire, his parents owning Bush Terminal in New
York. An exhibition was set up for Pittsburg, but then disaster
struck, and all her money was lost in the Wall Street Crash. But in
true Tamara style, she bounced back, by meeting a very rich young man
who owned a ranch in New Mexico.
All this time Tamara was painting Raphaella....
"Now a moment of
silence of reverence for Raphaella's mouth".
Cole Porter's 'I've got
you under my skin' filled the silence of the room, and Tamara sings along.
(After returning from America she picked up her life, got more and more
influential patrons and sitters. One day she saw a man in rags who
she asked to sit for a painting, the man looked so sad as he was being
painted and drew out a folded piece of paper which he opened out to
show Tamara, it was a picture of Rodin's sculpture of 'The Kiss',
which named the model who posed for it, who's lovely young body,
turned out to be the scruffy man in rags).
Tamara married again through the wishes of her mother to Baron Raoul
Kuffner who let her keep her lifestyle as an artist. They had come to
an amicable marriage arrangement, separate apartments, but always
dining together every night at Maxims. Unfortunately war broke out
again, her daughter Kizette refusing to flee with them to America.
The
portrait now finished, Tamara dressed ready for dinner at
Maxims...."Life is short and funny, an hour may be forever...Enough!"
and then Tamara was gone, and the audience was left applauding a
wonderfully creative piece of drama.
Deco Diva
Deco Diva is anecdotal theatre. It puts each member of a smallish
audience, for if it were larger it would not be so effective, in the
position of being able to listen to an outrageous Aunt of the Bertie
Wooster School. The stories flow seamlessly into a stream of
consciousness in which the unpleasant is acknowledged but not allowed
to mar the reliving of the highspots of a life devoted to being a bird
of paradise in a world overshadowed by war and recession. This was
the final curtain for Salon glamour and was already being eclipsed by
Hollywood and Kara Wilson's portrayal of Tamara de Lempicka catches a
world now lost for ever with delicacy and charm, and good
draftsmanship.
David Giles
all material copyright (c) of The Process or Bathfringe'99