EN*AMOR*ARTE
"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination..." ES MENTIRA, NO EXISTEN GUERRAS POLÍTICAS, RELIGIOSAS, ECONÓMICAS...TODAS SON LA MISMA GUERRA: LA GUERRA CONTRA LA IMAGINACIÓN.

In life Tamara de Lempicka was a Left Bank bisexual with an appetite for bohemian living. Her work, though, portrays the dubious glamour and discipline of fascism

Her time was the 1920s: a period of transition, an era in which functionalism merged with fantasy and formal social structures lurched into the frenetic. In essence, De Lempicka was a classicist, having admired Renaissance painting since her adolescent travels in Italy. But she astutely combined traditional portraiture with advertising techniques, photographic lighting, vistas of the tower architecture of great cities.

Her milieu was the glittery and scintillating Paris of the years between the wars, a place of high style and lascivious behaviour. With a callous authenticity, De Lempicka depicted the shifting morals of a Paris where nothing was precisely what it seemed. She lived and worked on the bisexual fringes of a society where there were no rules beyond the demands of style and entertainment. She was the great go-getter, a believer in exploiting one's resources to the ultimate. Her iconic green Bugatti wasn't green in reality but yellow. Nor was it even a Bugatti but a Renault. "There are no miracles," she stated with her icy realism. "There is only what you make."

Who was she? De Lempicka shuffled the facts of her biography much as she meddled with her birth date. Tamara Gurnick-Gorzka was born in Moscow - or could it have been Warsaw? - in 1898 or so, to a wealthy Polish mother and a cosmopolitan Russian father. Her background of social confidence and ease was to prove an advantage to a portraitist: she confronted her sitters on equal terms. In St Petersberg, she met Tadeusz Lempicki, a tall, saturnine attorney of noble family and, at the age of 14, announced her love for him. They were married just before the Russian revolution. Lempicki was arrested by the Bolsheviks but his wife secured his release.

Like other exiled White Russians, they arrived in Paris with no money, having abandoned their possessions. They now had a child, Kizette. Tadeusz Lempicki remained unemployed and moody. Tamara's portrait of her husband shows the queasy self-importance of the glamour boy displaced. These were years of deprivation, in which Tamara herself became determined to succeed as a professional artist. "My goal," she later wrote, "was never to copy, to create a new style, bright, luminous colours and to scent out elegance in my models." She became a prime interpreter of modernity.

De Lempicka's painting is a thing of gloss and gesture. In her early days in Paris, she enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and absorbed the work of the old masters, especially admiring Bronzino. In some ways, De Lempicka is a mannerist reborn. She went on to study in the studio of the symbolist Maurice Denis, a highly decorative painter who instilled the sense of discipline and structure in her work.

Her most influential mentor was the painter and critic André Lhote, perpetrator of a less strident, gentler-coloured form of cubism, a style easily acceptable to the bourgeoisie. In her early Paris paintings, De Lempicka employed this "synthetic cubist" method, an accumulation of small geometric planes used to startlingly voluptuous effect in images of women reclining, women bathing, women embracing, laconically stroking one another's thighs. The blatant display of the naked female body was a feature of art deco - this was, after all, the era of Josephine Baker shaking her banana skins. De Lempicka's pair of pointing-breasted giantesses, The Friends, disport themselves in front of a futuristic stage set of skyscrapers, a 1920s fantasy of big city sex.

But her images of female nudity also recalled the French neo-classical tradition. Her group painting Women Bathing is the Left Bank lesbian version of Ingres's luscious harem composition The Turkish Bath. The critics' divination of "perverse Ingrism" in De Lempicka's paintings did her burgeoning popularity no harm. In real life, she acted up to it, displaying her own tall, slender, curvy body outstretched on a divan, wearing a titillating white satin robe with marabou feather adornments. Tamara played her own art deco goddess of desire.

She was a workaholic, permitting interruptions in her nine-hour painting sessions only for such necessities as champagne, a massage and a bath. She sold herself shrewdly and by 1923 was beginning to exhibit in small galleries in Paris. The next year, her work was shown at the Salon des Femmes Artistes Modernes in Paris, and in 1925 she had her first solo exhibition in Milan.

Her social life advanced in parallel, displaying the full force of Tamara's "killer instinct" (her daughter's description). There was something predatory in the way she acquired so many lovers of both sexes, many of whom were also her models and her patrons. The model for her painting Beautiful Rafaela was picked up in the street and seduced with aplomb. The portrait throbs with an intense erotic energy. The liaison continued for a year.

Tamara gave up on Tadeusz and, brandishing diamond bracelets from wrist to shoulder, joined the European avant-garde celebrities: Marinetti, Jean Cocteau, Gabriel d'Annunzio. She visited d'Annunzio at his notorious villa Il Vittoriale in Gardone where, unusually, she resisted his advances and, equally unusually, failed to paint his portrait - a singular loss to the De Lempicka oeuvre. She was a spectacular attender of Natalie Barney's afternoons "for women only" and claimed to have snorted cocaine with André Gide.

Thanks to her contacts in the world of the Paris couturiers, De Lempicka always looked fabulous. Photographed in the right light, she could be Greta Garbo's sister. She made her entrance at smart parties in magnificent garments donated by Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli.

In the late 1920s, De Lempicka acquired her most important patrons, Doctor Pierre Boucard and his wife. Boucard was a medical scientist, inventor of Lacteol, a cure for indigestion. He had become an avid modernist and already owned several De Lempicka nudes, including her most flamboyant lesbian painting, Myrto, Two Women on a Couch. He now offered her a two-year contract to paint portraits of himself, his wife and daughter, also asking for an option on any other paintings she produced.

This sudden financial stability allowed her to buy a three-storey house and studio on Rue Mechain on the Left Bank. She commissioned its refurbishment by Robert Mallet-Stevens, the most brilliant French modernist designer of the time. With its svelte grey interior, chrome fittings and American cocktail bar it gave De Lempicka the setting of ultimate urban smartness to which she had long aspired.

A contemporary architectural photograph shows the new studio in all its pristine glory. There in the centre on its easel is the portrait of Madame Boucard, completed in 1931, a sophisticated and accomplished painting that tells us as much about De Lempicka as it does about the sitter. De Lempicka is the connoisseur of textiles, jewels, hairstyles, the cut of the garment, the swathe of the mink stole: no other painter of the period gives us so precise a reading of its material values. Madame Boucard is posed like a Renaissance courtesan, her right nipple erect beneath the oyster satin bodice. She's a figure of power, with something of the brutal allure of Wallis Simpson. What she tells us is that every sex act has its price.

Size mattered in the Europe of that time. De Lempicka's male portraits show gigantic caddishness. Spiv-shouldered Doctor Boucard, with his test tube and his microscope, looks more the slick sharp man about town than man of healing. Count Fürstenberg Herdringen is a glass-eyed monster in a Frenchman's navy beret. Most frightening of all is the colossal portrait of the Grand Duke Gabriel Constantinovich, with his gold-braided uniform and empty, sneering face.

De Lempicka was an artist of the Fascist superworld: her portraits were allied to the "call to order" movement, the return to monumental realism in European art. Her art exudes the dark and dubious glamour of authoritarian discipline. When she paints the Duchesse de la Salle, the Duchess is in jackboots, one hand thrust in her pocket in an attitude of menace. It is a tremendous portrait, painted with the sheer theatrical enjoyment, the unerring sense of decor, of De Lempicka's best work.

In 1933 she remarried. Baron Raoul Kuffner was the owner of vast estates donated to his family of stockbreeders and brewers by Emperor Franz-Josef for supplying the Hapsburg court. De Lempicka had already portrayed her future husband as a dandy desperado, gazing out inscrutably from behind hooded lids. She had also painted - and in doing so disposed of - his previous mistress, the Andalusian dancer Nana de Herrera, selecting her as model for the most overtly decadent of the "damned women" in the notorious Group of Four Nudes .

De Lempicka was never a consistent painter. As with many ruthless people, her swagger could give way to a strain of awful mawkishness: cubism and kitsch. Once she became Baroness Kuffner, Tamara lost direction. The urge for fame, and indeed subsistence, left her. The age of art deco, in which she thrived, was over. Her sentimental studies of old men with guitars and lachrymose mother superiors are a dreadful anti-climax after the bitchy candour of her portrait of lesbian nightclub owner Suzy Solidor.

The political terrors of Europe in the 1930s were impinging: she and the baron, on holiday in Austria, were appalled to have their breakfast on the hotel verandah interrupted by a singing parade of Hitler Youth. In 1939, urged by Tamara, who was partly Jewish, Kuffner sold his estates in Hungary and they moved to the US. In New York, she tried abstract expressionism unsuccessfully, and was reduced to the role of a chic curiosity, "the painting baroness".

De Lempicka died in 1980 in Mexico, having directed that her ashes be scattered over the crater of volcanic Mount Popocatepetl. The woman who in her lifetime was described as "a little hot potato" came to a suitably inflammatory end. Her expensively dressed rogues gallery of portraits, though hardly great art, add up to a unique and alarming social document, recording the seductive surface textures of a European society en route to self-destruct.

....all others are subsumed by it"

 Picasso- Guernika

Anna Ancher (1859 – 1935) was in reality the only woman painter among the Skagen artists, a fact that was mirrored in her paintings, which depict the world of women. She painted many women – many more than men – and these women were often alone. A typical Anna Ancher motif was a single female figure in an interior setting – a bedroom or a living room – quietly occupied with a task or merely thoughtful and withdrawn. This contemplation is a very characteristic trait in Anna Ancher’s female figures. Their concentration is directed inward to their inner world, and there is almost never any eye contact with the beholder because the women look down, have their eyes closed or their backs turned.

It is significant that Anna Ancher’s figures are placed indoors. This is where she differs from the male Skagen artists who very often painted their subjects out of doors. They painted the fishermen on the beach, the sea, the dunes and the view over Skagen. With her interior motifs, Anna Ancher was more closely connected to other women artists of that time, artists that preferred to paint the immediacy of the intimate sphere – the rooms in the home, with children, sisters, mothers or servant girls as their models.

Anna Ancher: Young girl in front of a lighted lamp, 1887

There are several reasons for female artists’ choice of motif. The home, housekeeping and children were the domain and responsibility of the women. This is where they were, so these motifs were close at hand. During the 1800s it was not acceptable for women, particularly middle-class women, to appear in public unaccompanied by men – not even to paint. Women were thus bound to remain in the home, also via their economic dependence on their husband or family as it was not considered acceptable, and was not common either, that the daughters and wives of the middle classes had an occupation. Their possibilities of an education were, therefore, extremely limited – at the time when Anna Ancher lived women artists were not even allowed to attend the Royal Academy. This had a significant influence on their choice of motif because they, as opposed to the men, were not schooled in the execution of monumental scenes with many figures of which Michael Ancher’s huge paintings of fishermen are an example.

Anna Ancher’s female figures can be divided into two groups. One group is made up of young middle-class women and the other of fishermen’s wives and daughters.

The middle-class women are easily recognised by their very respectable long dresses, with long sleeves and, at times, lace trimmings, their hair done up and their slim waists – see a. o. Young girl in lamplight and Interior with red poppies. They are in rooms that can be characterised as being feminine, rooms that mirror their femininity. These rooms or interiors are painted in pale light colours and are characterised by a sense of quietude and absorption, and the female figures are often accompanied by flowers.

One can even detect a tendency where the flowers gradually replace the women – as in Interior with clematis – and where the flowers themselves finally disappear and the purely feminine room remains as in Interior. Brøndum’s annex, for example.

The other group of Anna Ancher’s female figures, the fishermen’s wives and daughters are first and foremost characterised by their headscarves – black or white, depending on whether they are widows or not. In Anna Ancher’s paintings they are closely bound up with religion: the women are either in church or at prayer meetings – for example Young girl attending a service at Skagen Church and A prayer meeting. Around 1900 the Evangelic Church movement has gained a solid foothold among the fishing population in Skagen – particularly among the women. Popularly speaking, the men went to the pub while the women turned to the church for succour and support in their often hard and frugal lives.

Anna Ancher was the only one among the Skagen artists who depicted the religious life in Skagen. This may have been because it was, as mentioned before, a women’s world, but personal reasons most certainly also played a part for Anna Ancher. Besides being the only woman in the artists’ colony she was also the only artist who was born and grew up in Skagen. Anna Ancher’s mother and sister were religious. They were both deeply involved in the Evangelic Church movement and as a child Anna Ancher accompanied her mother to bible readings and prayer meetings. Her adult life – as an artist and as a member of the artists’ colony – stood in sharp contrast to this religious upbringing. The Skagen artists were predominantly freethinkers and atheists and led an at times wild (at least in the eyes of the Skagen community) bohemian existence.

Anna Ancher: By the grave, 1913

It is a distinct possibility that Anna Ancher felt an unconscious form of schism between her two worlds – the world of childhood, family and religion as opposed to that of the artists’ colony. It could well be such a schism that is expressed in her symbolist painting Grief, where she has depicted herself naked on one side of a cross and her mother with hands folded in prayer on the other. Here, Anna Ancher has depicted herself in the manner of a classical Maria Magdalene, who in former religious pictures was typically depicted as the repentant sinner, naked at the foot of the cross, her face covered by her long hair.

Anna Ancher has become known as the artist who painted light and sunshine, as an impressionistic inspired colourist for whom colour and light were of the utmost significance. The exhibition’s paintings of completive, withdrawn and thoughtful women show another side of Anna Ancher, a more serious side where the content of the paintings plays a significant role. It is the women’s lives that are in focus, lives as those lived around Anna Ancher, but also women’s lives understood on a more general and universal level.

"Indeed, the true miracle of the language of art is not that it enables the artist to create the illusion of reality. It is that under the hands of a great master the image becomes translucent. In teaching us to see the visible world afresh, he gives us the illusion of looking into the invisible realms of the mind - if only we know, as Philostratus says, how to use our eyes." (from Art and Illusion by Esnst Gombrich)

 Piensa. Detente un instante. Mira los bisontes sobre las paredes del fondo de las cuevas.

Aquellas primeras criaturas eran casi animales. Era el despertad del hombre, sus primeros pasos en el planeta.

Piensa.

 Seres frágiles, asustados, gritando en la oscuridad. Animales incapaces de entender porque existe el día, la noche, el fuego , la luz, la lluvia

You think: one man , one woman…. Almost animals… The arousing of humanity. One man, one woman...Screaming in darkness… frightened animals who doesn’t understand why day, night, light, rain, wind, fog...exist.

 Animales que deben cazar para sobrevivir, matar o morir, comer para seguir adelante, follar para reproducirse...

Pero...qué demonios sucede a esta especie?? 

Que tiene las manos libres!!! Y en su cerebro unas conexiones nerviosas nuevas!!

Y este prodigio....hace que miren a su alrededor y no solo vean montañas, llanuras, mares o bosques...

La primera mujer, el primer hombres.... sintieron emoción

Al les conmovió dentro.

Nuestra especie está capacitada para ver la belleza, ese extraño misterio que no ha conseguido desentrañar la filosofía, la ciencia, la ética ni la estética....

Nuestra especie se emocionó mirando una tormenta, sintió miedo, pero también emoción. Este es el origen de todo Arte.

Después llegaron las religiones y los moralistas y lo dividieron en casto e impuro, hablaron de salud y de perversión.

El arte no entiende de moral. Nació de la fantasía y en la fantasía no existe gobierno.

One man,one women who must hunt for surviving…as animals…

 But…what happens whit this specie? 

 Specie whit free hands… different brain…This specie wake up… look at the world..Mountains, seas, plains, valleys…and…

 feel emotions… because…our specie… we… can see beauty.. BE-A-U-TY.

Our specie can move when look at a storm… fear and emotion.. This is the genesis of all kind of art.. The miracle of feeling emotion when we see beauty…

 The perfect beauty or the perverse beauty.. Never mind.