9 July 2008
The best books over and by Leonardo da Vinci
Here are my private selection of the best books over and by Leonardo da Vinci; especially for UK and Europe
27 June 2008
Salvador Dali - Painting and Film
I just came across this article in The New York Times about Dali films and paintings. At the moment at Museum of Modern Art in New York is a special exhibition about Dali "Dali: Painting and Film” continues through Sept. 15;
At the moment that can be as often you please, thanks to “Dalí: Painting and Film,” a strangely piecemeal, open-ended and inspiring exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Organized by the Tate Modern in London in cooperation with the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí in Figueres, Spain, it has been overseen by Jodi Hauptman, a curator of drawings at MoMA, and is accompanied by an extensive film program selected by Anne Morra, an assistant curator in film. The show tracks the traffic of images, themes and ideas between Dalí’s films, both realized and not, and his more static efforts, including paintings, drawings, letters, illustrated notes, scenarios and other ephemera.
“Un Chien Andalou” is projected continuously in the show’s first gallery, following a batch of paintings, collages and ink drawings that Dalí made from 1922 through 1931. They include a stately portrait of Buñuel from 1924 done in Picasso’s neo-Classical style, and hints of things to come. A painting and drawing from 1927 feature a severed hand, like the one seen in “Un Chien Andalou” lying on a busy Parisian street being poked with a stick by a moody young woman.
The penchant for decaying flesh so present in Dalí’s art is literalized quite bluntly in “Un Chien Andalou.” It takes the form of two dead donkeys laid out on the strings of grand pianos. Those are harnessed to a young man trying to force his attentions on the young woman who earlier dodged the straight razor, holding him back like a combination of guilt, social constraint and fear. The cluster of scurrying ants — like that stream from the stigmatalike wound in another hand in the film — recur throughout the exhibition, migrating across faces, gathering in corners, exploring bodily orifices. (Also on view is a detailed letter from Buñuel about how to transport ants from Spain to Paris and have them lively enough for purposes of filming.)
Born in the Catalan town of Figueres in 1904, Dalí was endowed with a litany of textbook neuroses. He was named for an older brother who died the year before he was born, and he never lived down the notion that he was a poor substitute; he learned early on to use outrageous behavior to mask his shyness, inferiority complex and sexual ambivalence.
At an early age he recognized painting as his salvation, demonstrating a gift for rendering that suggested Van Eyck’s exacting skill softened by the subtle lusciousness of Vermeer. He read Freud word for word, devoured avant-garde magazines. Inspired by Bosch, de Chirico and Miro, he began to paint Surrealism’s most optically precise and psychologically disturbing images almost before he ever went to Paris. His vast pristine plains interrupted by jagged mountains, architectural ruins and variously grotesque, fraught and sexual signs of life are among painting’s most convincing portraits of the mind and its discontents.
But Dalí’s devotion to painting was not exclusive. There was the continuing performance that was Dalí himself, with his gift for publicity and controversy, his relentless narcissism and frenetic imagination. There is his enormous body of writing: a novel, poetry, an autobiography and numerous theoretical essays. There were set designs, beginning in 1927 with those for “Mariana Pineda,” a play by another close art-school friend, the poet Federico García Lorca, and later for ballets by Massine and Balanchine.
He gravitated to film as soon as movies began to be shown regularly in theaters throughout Europe (including Figueres) in the late 1910s and early ’20s. Like many avant-garde artists in both Europe and America, he admired the work of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and the Marx Brothers, especially Harpo, the silent and, for him, most Surreal sibling. (Groucho Marx noted that Dalí “is in love with my brother — in a nice way.”)
But mainly Dalí grasped that film’s capacities — for depicting irrationality in action; for dissolving, continually mutating images; and for an intensely real unreality — were all ready-made for his sensibility and his desire to reach a mass audience. Dalí’s pristine, limitless plains were lifted almost verbatim from the implicitly surreal landscape of his beloved Catalonia, but they also had the artificiality of a Hollywood soundstage.
Nicely, the show at MoMA doesn’t sequester the films in pitch-black rooms. Their grainy or silvery grisailles flicker in full sight of Dalí’s often small, intensely colored paintings, which sit on the walls like brilliant boxed jewels.
As the exhibition ebbs and flows, the drawings and films gradually supersede the paintings. Subsequent galleries display nonstop projections of “L’Age d’Or,” which Buñuel and Dalí made in 1930, and the somewhat questionable “Destino,” the sprightly animated short of love and loss that Dalí worked on energetically for Walt Disney in 1946, only to have Disney pull the plug. It was resuscitated and completed in consultation with John Hench, one of Dalí’s original collaborators at Disney, in 2003, but a large batch of Dalí’s original sketches attest to the attempt to remain true to his ideas.
In the final gallery “Chaos and Creation,” a 1960 video of a Happening that Dalí staged with the photographer Philippe Halsman, involves some nearly naked women, a few very clean pigs and an intense dislike of Mondrian. It is both a period piece and a testament to an artist striving to keep up with his times.
“Adventures in Upper Mongolia — Homage to Raymond Roussel,” a largely abstract film conceived by Dalí and made by the Spanish director José Montes-Baquer in 1975 is more original. The narration of the film’s veil-like layers and suspended patches of rusts, golds and blues concerns a journey in search of hallucinogenic mushrooms. The label informs us that the motifs are microscopic images, much enlarged, of the oxidation on the brass details of some fountain pens, and moreover that Dalí urinated on them every day to accelerate the oxidation process. The film could have been made by a young Pictures appropriation artist in the 1980s.
The show’s drop-dead gallery is dominated by an enormous projection of the dream sequence Dalí designed for “Spellbound,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 suspense classic starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. One scene of a man with a giant pair of scissors cutting a huge curtain painted with multiple eyes echoes “Un Chien Andalou.” (In fact it had been planned before Dali signed on.) In her catalog essay about the film, Sara Cochran rightly considers this an indication of how completely contemporary culture and especially Hollywood had assimilated the style and motifs of Surrealism. For all its violence, the razor scene in “Un Chien Andalou” announced an intention not only to shock but to “open” the eye to a new way of seeing. MoMA’s fragmentary yet haunting show provides a fresh view of how Dalí, for all his outrageousness, never stopped trying to live according to the ambition he so brutally visualized.
Reflections Through a Surrealistic Eye: Dalí and the Camera
Published: June 27, 200
Nearly 80 years on, the famous image from “Un Chien Andalou,” which Salvador Dali and his art-school friend Luis Buñuel cobbled together in Paris in April 1929, remains one of the most shocking in all cinema. A woman’s face fills the screen. A man’s left hand widens the lids of her left eye; his right begins to draw a straight razor across it. Then there is, as it were, a jump cut. The razor slices through the eye of a dead cow and gelatinous ooze tumbles forth. Yick, and whew. Such special effects are crude by today’s digital standards. But the high point of the first genuinely Surrealist film can still be churning no matter how often you see it.
At the moment that can be as often you please, thanks to “Dalí: Painting and Film,” a strangely piecemeal, open-ended and inspiring exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Organized by the Tate Modern in London in cooperation with the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí in Figueres, Spain, it has been overseen by Jodi Hauptman, a curator of drawings at MoMA, and is accompanied by an extensive film program selected by Anne Morra, an assistant curator in film. The show tracks the traffic of images, themes and ideas between Dalí’s films, both realized and not, and his more static efforts, including paintings, drawings, letters, illustrated notes, scenarios and other ephemera.
“Un Chien Andalou” is projected continuously in the show’s first gallery, following a batch of paintings, collages and ink drawings that Dalí made from 1922 through 1931. They include a stately portrait of Buñuel from 1924 done in Picasso’s neo-Classical style, and hints of things to come. A painting and drawing from 1927 feature a severed hand, like the one seen in “Un Chien Andalou” lying on a busy Parisian street being poked with a stick by a moody young woman.
The penchant for decaying flesh so present in Dalí’s art is literalized quite bluntly in “Un Chien Andalou.” It takes the form of two dead donkeys laid out on the strings of grand pianos. Those are harnessed to a young man trying to force his attentions on the young woman who earlier dodged the straight razor, holding him back like a combination of guilt, social constraint and fear. The cluster of scurrying ants — like that stream from the stigmatalike wound in another hand in the film — recur throughout the exhibition, migrating across faces, gathering in corners, exploring bodily orifices. (Also on view is a detailed letter from Buñuel about how to transport ants from Spain to Paris and have them lively enough for purposes of filming.)
Born in the Catalan town of Figueres in 1904, Dalí was endowed with a litany of textbook neuroses. He was named for an older brother who died the year before he was born, and he never lived down the notion that he was a poor substitute; he learned early on to use outrageous behavior to mask his shyness, inferiority complex and sexual ambivalence.
At an early age he recognized painting as his salvation, demonstrating a gift for rendering that suggested Van Eyck’s exacting skill softened by the subtle lusciousness of Vermeer. He read Freud word for word, devoured avant-garde magazines. Inspired by Bosch, de Chirico and Miro, he began to paint Surrealism’s most optically precise and psychologically disturbing images almost before he ever went to Paris. His vast pristine plains interrupted by jagged mountains, architectural ruins and variously grotesque, fraught and sexual signs of life are among painting’s most convincing portraits of the mind and its discontents.
But Dalí’s devotion to painting was not exclusive. There was the continuing performance that was Dalí himself, with his gift for publicity and controversy, his relentless narcissism and frenetic imagination. There is his enormous body of writing: a novel, poetry, an autobiography and numerous theoretical essays. There were set designs, beginning in 1927 with those for “Mariana Pineda,” a play by another close art-school friend, the poet Federico García Lorca, and later for ballets by Massine and Balanchine.
He gravitated to film as soon as movies began to be shown regularly in theaters throughout Europe (including Figueres) in the late 1910s and early ’20s. Like many avant-garde artists in both Europe and America, he admired the work of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and the Marx Brothers, especially Harpo, the silent and, for him, most Surreal sibling. (Groucho Marx noted that Dalí “is in love with my brother — in a nice way.”)
But mainly Dalí grasped that film’s capacities — for depicting irrationality in action; for dissolving, continually mutating images; and for an intensely real unreality — were all ready-made for his sensibility and his desire to reach a mass audience. Dalí’s pristine, limitless plains were lifted almost verbatim from the implicitly surreal landscape of his beloved Catalonia, but they also had the artificiality of a Hollywood soundstage.
Nicely, the show at MoMA doesn’t sequester the films in pitch-black rooms. Their grainy or silvery grisailles flicker in full sight of Dalí’s often small, intensely colored paintings, which sit on the walls like brilliant boxed jewels.
As the exhibition ebbs and flows, the drawings and films gradually supersede the paintings. Subsequent galleries display nonstop projections of “L’Age d’Or,” which Buñuel and Dalí made in 1930, and the somewhat questionable “Destino,” the sprightly animated short of love and loss that Dalí worked on energetically for Walt Disney in 1946, only to have Disney pull the plug. It was resuscitated and completed in consultation with John Hench, one of Dalí’s original collaborators at Disney, in 2003, but a large batch of Dalí’s original sketches attest to the attempt to remain true to his ideas.
In the final gallery “Chaos and Creation,” a 1960 video of a Happening that Dalí staged with the photographer Philippe Halsman, involves some nearly naked women, a few very clean pigs and an intense dislike of Mondrian. It is both a period piece and a testament to an artist striving to keep up with his times.
“Adventures in Upper Mongolia — Homage to Raymond Roussel,” a largely abstract film conceived by Dalí and made by the Spanish director José Montes-Baquer in 1975 is more original. The narration of the film’s veil-like layers and suspended patches of rusts, golds and blues concerns a journey in search of hallucinogenic mushrooms. The label informs us that the motifs are microscopic images, much enlarged, of the oxidation on the brass details of some fountain pens, and moreover that Dalí urinated on them every day to accelerate the oxidation process. The film could have been made by a young Pictures appropriation artist in the 1980s.
The show’s drop-dead gallery is dominated by an enormous projection of the dream sequence Dalí designed for “Spellbound,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 suspense classic starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. One scene of a man with a giant pair of scissors cutting a huge curtain painted with multiple eyes echoes “Un Chien Andalou.” (In fact it had been planned before Dali signed on.) In her catalog essay about the film, Sara Cochran rightly considers this an indication of how completely contemporary culture and especially Hollywood had assimilated the style and motifs of Surrealism. For all its violence, the razor scene in “Un Chien Andalou” announced an intention not only to shock but to “open” the eye to a new way of seeing. MoMA’s fragmentary yet haunting show provides a fresh view of how Dalí, for all his outrageousness, never stopped trying to live according to the ambition he so brutally visualized.
24 June 2008
The Lagend of Wawel Dragon
I recently spent a few days in Cracow (Kraków is the Polish spelling), celebrating my birthday together with my partner. He had never been to Cracow and I thought he should visit at least once one of the most interesting, historic and magical cities in Poland. One day in May we arrived in Cracow. And of course we had to visit Wawel, the Royal Castle, the Cathedral and the Dragon’s Den. Yep; it is a serious thing, the Dragon’s Den under the Wawel Hill. As a creator of two extraordinary dragons, Betelgeuse and Mintaka, I could not of course ignore the fascinating legend of Cracow about the Wawel Dragon. I even made a short movie – I filmed the dragon’s den for you. I will publish it as soon as I can get my Sony camcorder software to download the video from my Sony Camcorder!
For now here is an illustration of the Wawel Dragon from Sebastian Münster's, Cosmographie Universalis from 1544,
As usual in European culture the Wawel Dragon is a monster. A carnivorous, gigantic beast, consuming young women, and he is particular fond of virgins (what is it that’s so special about virgins?!).
King Krak, a legendary king of Cracow, was very afraid that soon he would have to leave the newly founded town if no one could stop the Dragon eating young girls, killing civilians, pillaging their homes and devouring their livestock.
The bravest knights and warriors of the King took on the fight against the dragon but none of them succeed in vanquishing it. The King became desperate. When every girl in the city was eventually sacrificed except one, the King's daughter Wanda, the King promised his beautiful daughter's hand in marriage to anybody who could defeat the dragon. Great warriors from near and far fought for the prize and failed. One day, a poor cobbler's apprentice named Skuba Dratewka accepted the challenge. He stuffed a lamb with sulphur and put it outside the dragon's cave. The dragon ate it and soon became extremely thirsty. He turned to the Vistula River for relief and he drank and drank and drank. But no amount of water could quell his aching stomach, and after swelling up from drinking half of the Vistula River, he exploded! Skuba Dratewka married the King's daughter as promised and they lived happily ever after.
In Poland to this day people who are admired for dealing with tricky situations in a shrewd way are sometimes described in slang as ‘skubany’.
For now here is an illustration of the Wawel Dragon from Sebastian Münster's, Cosmographie Universalis from 1544,
As usual in European culture the Wawel Dragon is a monster. A carnivorous, gigantic beast, consuming young women, and he is particular fond of virgins (what is it that’s so special about virgins?!).
King Krak, a legendary king of Cracow, was very afraid that soon he would have to leave the newly founded town if no one could stop the Dragon eating young girls, killing civilians, pillaging their homes and devouring their livestock.
The bravest knights and warriors of the King took on the fight against the dragon but none of them succeed in vanquishing it. The King became desperate. When every girl in the city was eventually sacrificed except one, the King's daughter Wanda, the King promised his beautiful daughter's hand in marriage to anybody who could defeat the dragon. Great warriors from near and far fought for the prize and failed. One day, a poor cobbler's apprentice named Skuba Dratewka accepted the challenge. He stuffed a lamb with sulphur and put it outside the dragon's cave. The dragon ate it and soon became extremely thirsty. He turned to the Vistula River for relief and he drank and drank and drank. But no amount of water could quell his aching stomach, and after swelling up from drinking half of the Vistula River, he exploded! Skuba Dratewka married the King's daughter as promised and they lived happily ever after.
In Poland to this day people who are admired for dealing with tricky situations in a shrewd way are sometimes described in slang as ‘skubany’.
21 May 2008
The Evolution of the Dragon, by Ellliot Smith
I did some search on Gutenberg.org about the subject fantasy art (for my book "Much Ado About Fantasy Art History) and found this scientific article (book) about dragons. The Evolution of the Dragon, by Elliot Smith (PROFESSOR OF ANATOMY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER) from 1919.
Very interesting one, maybe not for an average reader but for the more intellectual one....
If you are into ancient time, history, archaeology and anthropology maybe you will find it fascinating. Here a fragment from the article:
Very interesting one, maybe not for an average reader but for the more intellectual one....
If you are into ancient time, history, archaeology and anthropology maybe you will find it fascinating. Here a fragment from the article:
In the earliest records from Egypt and Babylonia it is customary to portray a king's beneficence by representing him initiating irrigation works. In course of time he came to be regarded, not merely as the giver of the water which made the desert fertile, but as himself the personification and the giver of the vital powers of water. The fertility of the land and the welfare of the people thus came to be regarded as dependent upon the king's vitality. Hence it was not illogical to kill him when his virility showed signs of failing and so imperilled the country's prosperity. But when the view developed that the dead king acquired a new grant of vitality in the other world he became the god Osiris, who was able to confer even greater boons of life-giving to the land and people than was the case before. He was the Nile, and he fertilized the land. The original dragon was a beneficent creature, the personification of water, and was identified with kings and gods.But the enemy of Osiris became an evil dragon, and was identified with Set.
The dragon-myth, however, did not really begin to develop until an ageing king refused to be slain, and called upon the Great Mother, as the giver of life, to rejuvenate him. Her only elixir was human blood; and to obtain it she was compelled to make a human sacrifice. Her murderous act led to her being compared with and ultimately identified with a man-slaying lioness or a cobra. The story of the slaying of the dragon is a much distorted rumour of this incident; and in the process of elaboration the incidents were subjected to every kind of interpretation and also confusion with the legendary account of the conflict between Horus and Set.
When a substitute was obtained to replace the blood the slaying of a human victim was no longer logically necessary: but an explanation had to be found for the persistence of this incident in the story. Mankind (no longer a mere individual human sacrifice) had become sinful and rebellious (the act of rebellion being complaints that the king or god was growing old) and had to be destroyed as a punishment for this treason. The Great Mother continued to act as the avenger of the king or god. But the enemies of the god were also punished by Horus in the legend of Horus and Set. The two stories hence became confused the one with the other. The king Horus took the place of the Great Mother as the avenger of the gods. As she was identified with the moon, he became the Sun-god, and assumed many of the Great Mother's attributes, and also became her son. In the further development of the myth, when the Sun-god had completely usurped his mother's place, the infamy of her deeds of destruction seems to have led to her being confused with the rebellious men who were now called the followers of Set, Horus's enemy. Thus an evil dragon emerged from this blend of the attributes of the Great Mother and Set. This is the Babylonian Tiamat. From the amazingly complex jumble of this tissue of confusion all the incidents of the dragon-myth were derived.
When attributes of the Water-god or his enemy became assimilated with those of the Great Mother and the Warrior Sun-god, the animals with which these deities were identified came to be regarded individually and collectively as concrete expressions of the Water-god's powers. Thus the cow and the gazelle, the falcon and the eagle, the lion and the serpent, the fish and the crocodile became symbols of the life-giving and the life-destroying powers of water, and composite monsters or dragons were invented by combining parts of these various creatures to express the different manifestations of the vital powers of water. The process of elaboration of the attributes of these monsters led to the development of an amazingly complex myth: but the story became still further involved when the dragon's life-controlling powers became confused with man's vital spirit and identified with the good or evil genius which was regarded as the guest, welcome or unwelcome, of every individual's body, and the arbiter of his destiny. In my remarks on the ka and the fravashi I have merely hinted at the vast complexity of these elements of confusion.
16 May 2008
Arcimboldo - an eccentric artis
I am busy at the moment writing a book about Fantasy Art and its history. While searching online and reading reports and books on this subject, I have discovered that some artists, that for me so obviously (and without any doubt) should belong to the genre of unique fantasy art/fantastic artists haven’t been mention at all; either in books or reports. Extremely peculiar.
One of the artists that I haven’t come across in any of the sources I looked through is Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Maybe the reason that nobody has mentioned him is the fact that his art is very bizarre and very difficult to categorize. People love to pigeonhole everything. If something or somebody is very unique or uncanny or extremely original and difficult to put away in a drawer with other similar things than sometimes we just ignore it or forget it. This is only my speculation.
Back to the artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Arcimboldo was born in Milan in 1527 and grew up during the High Renaissance (Mannerism). He was extremely famous during his lifetime. He was a court painter of Emperor Ferdinand I (Habsburg), then Maximilian II and at the end Rudolph II. Part of Arcimboldo's duties included designing gala events for the imperial family. These were flashy affairs with gilded fountains and rivers of champagne, parades and promenades, flocks of coloured birds, music, theatre, tons of original artwork, sculptures, and much pageantry. Arcimboldo invented many unique special effects for these events such as an enormous hydro-mechanically powered musical instrument which acted like a modern colour organ; called the "Harpsichord of Colour." He was a man of many talents, and in the vein of other Renaissance great spirits (like Leonardo da Vinci) he served also as an architect, stage designer, engineer, water engineer and art specialist.
But as soon as he was dead he was totally forgotten. I can only speculate again about the reason, why people lost interest in his art. Perhaps he was misunderstood by the generations that followed? Maybe his sinister paintings weren’t enjoyable, interesting or intriguing? Or maybe they were too bamboozling, too insane for people of past centuries. Some of the contemporary reviews spoke about “the state of a deranged mind”. The interest in his abstruse and fantastic pictures, of which we only have a very few originals nowadays, revived only at the end of the 19th century. The surrealist movement brought him back into the public interest.
Personally I like his bizarre paintings. They are such unique art works, unique concepts, the creations of a very eccentric, intelligent and sophisticated brain. The documents of the time bear witness to the fact that monarchs and his contemporaries in general were also enthusiastic about his art.
His most recognizable paintings are known as the The Four Seasons series. The artistic concept of these pictures from 1563 was unique and laid the foundation of Arcimboldo’s success as a painter. The Four Seasons consist of four paintings - Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn. All of them depict faces and heads but not normal human heads, vegetable-fruit-flower-tree heads.
Other famous works by him are: Water and Fire (1566), The Lawyer (1566), The Cook (1570) another series of the Four Seasons from 1572, two series of Four Seasons in 1573. He painted The Four Seasons twice again in 1577.
In 1591 he painted two of his most famous pictures, Flora (c.1591) and Vertumnus (1590-1591. Vertumnus is a portrait of Rudolph II, showing him as Vertumnus, the ancient Roman god of vegetation and transformation. The painting Verumnus consists entirely of magnificent fruits, flowers and vegetables. Rudolph II awarded Arcimboldo one of his highest orders in 1592. Next year on 11 July 1593 the painter died.
The Winter 1572 (Private Collection, Bergamo)
Looking at Arcimboldo’s bizarre paintings I can’t escape from thoughts about the human brain and the endless possibilities of the uncontrolled imagination. How did a man born in the time of the Renaissance, in a time when nobody painted such paintings, decide to create monstrous images of human heads?
For example, have a look at the Winter - head from The Four Seasons. The profile of the man is made up from the knobby stump of a tree, with a broken branch for the nose, moss for the stubble on the chin and two parasitic mushrooms for the lips. Is this more or less sinister than the hellish monsters thought up by Hieronymus Bosch? Arcimboldo paints a parody that is at times almost plausible in its suggestions of death and decay in a living being. The Winter portrait, the image of the head can horrify people, but at the same time it is so amazingly beautiful. The balance of the colour-palette is astonishing and tremendous. What a great imagination Arcimboldo had, and what a great colourist he was!
These puzzle-visionary-capriccio images of all the Portraits-Heads-Faces made by Arcimboldo are incredibly unusual, surreal and fantastic. I am curious if there are viewers who won’t see any faces in his paintings, only flowers and vegetables?
Above is a painting from a series based on the Four Seasons; this one is called Summer. The nose of the person appears to be made out of a very ripe cucumber. The chin is from a pear, and the cheek is made from a peach. Look closely at the man's coat. Can you see the name of the artist woven into the collar of his jacket, and the date 1573 embroidered on the shoulder?
8 May 2008
Tamara Lempicka – the master of mystification.
Maybe you are wondering why I am talking here about Tamara Lempicka. She has nothing to do with Fantasy Art; not really.
She painted some surreal landscapes, at the end of her artistic career, but they were not especially outstanding or unusually beautiful. Personally I think they are not even average. But nevertheless she wasn't a surreal painter, she was an very original portraitist. But it is her life that is more interesting that her art. She was the master of mystification; she mastered the skill of disorientation, puzzlement and confusion to the highest level. There is no single thing from her biography she didn't colorize at all, sometimes for public relation purposes, sometimes out of vanity, indisputably that is why the story of her life is as difficult to put together as biographies of the masters of early gothic.
It is hard to tell you where Lempicka's paintings can be seen, firstly because they are owned predominantly by private collectors.
I had enormous luck once when I was in Vienna, I think it was in the autumn of 2004. Almost the whole collection of her paintings were to be found in BA – CA Kunst Forum. That exhibition was the first complete exhibition of her work. I was totally conquered by her work. As I was born in Poland I heard of course about her (she was one of the not so many famous female artists and not only that, she was Polish too!) but I never saw her work live. I expected lots of paintings in Art Deco style but I had no idea that she was not only very famous in her time for her lifestyle but also for her talent.
Some official text "She is best known for her pictures epitomising the flair and lifestyle of Art Deco: her Self-portrait in a green Bugatti stands as a symbol for the period, but Lempicka's exceptional artistic qualities have remained largely unappreciated. Today's art world is experiencing renewed interest in the figurative and realistic painting of the 20th century. The younger generation has rediscovered artists who, turning their backs on the official avant-gardes, developed independently and made their own way. Artists such as Frida Kahlo, Edward Hopper, Francis Picabia and Tamara de Lempicka have acquired new importance and relevancy in postmodern art history as well"
The BA-CA Kunstforum showed included around 60 major works from museums and private collections in Europe and the USA.
I found in her painting lots of cool erotic undercurrents. I will try to explain it: a combination of sultry sensuality and cool classicism, together with the influence of cubism give the paintings an original, unique erotic magic. It was a quite experience for me. I visited the exhibition twice, and spent a lot time inside the walls, admiring Lempicka's paintings. I was imagining the exciting time that she lived between the two World Wars, the time of decadence (almost every artist would love to be decadent), Paris, Hollywood, her marriages, her sexual affairs (lots of them). Her style of living was very different from contemporary moral norms. We have become more and more strait-laced. I am wondering why?
Where can you see Lempicka's work? Three paintings are owned and exposed in Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, in Paris. To know: "The Unfinished Man", "Kizette on the Balcony" and "Girl with Gloves". National Museum in Warsaw has owned three of her paintings, but unfortunately they do not expose it. (I guess it is possible to arrange a private 'meeting', I will try it very soon). The rest of her paintings are owned by private collections/collectors. If I am wrong, please let me know and correct me.
Dream
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