January 20, 2025 • 38 mins
Tamara de Lemicka was a trailblazer with an incredible, fresh style that really defined and influenced the development of Art Deco. She lived a life that was focused on originality, both artistically and personally.
Research:
- Bade, Patrick. “Lempicka.” Parkstone International. 2020.
- Brown, Mark. “Georgia O’Keeffe flower painting sells for record-breaking $44.4m.” The Guardian. Nov. 20, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/nov/20/georgia-okeeffe-painting-world-record-price-art-woman#:~:text=Georgia%20O'Keeffe%20flower%20painting%20sells%20for%20record%2Dbreaking%20%2444.4m,-This%20article%20is&text=A%20painting%20of%20a%20white,the%20Georgia%20O'Keeffe%20piece.
- De Lempicka-Foxhall, Kizette. “Passion by Design.” Abbeville Press. New York. 2020. 2nd Edition.
- MacCarthy, Fiona. “Artist of the Fascist superworld: the life of Tamara de Lempicka.” The Guardian. May 14, 2004. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/may/15/art
- Mori, Gioia, et al. “Tamara de Lempicka.” Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Yale University Press. 2024.
- Neret, Gilles. “Tamara de Lempicka.” Taschen America. 2017.
- “Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) - Portrait de Marjorie Ferry.” Christies. May 5, 2009. https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6252179
- “Tamara de Lempicka, Portraitist.” New York Times. March 20, 1980. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1980/03/20/111143617.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
- Zelazko, Alicja. "Tamara de Lempicka". Encyclopedia Britannica, 23 Oct. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tamara-de-Lempicka
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today we're going
to talk about an artist who has kind of been
on my radar for a while, but definitely as a
(00:22):
bit of a backgrounder. And then one of my very
dearest friends suggested her because there is a really fabulous
exhibit of her work going on at the DeYoung Museum
in San Francisco right now, not for a whole lot longer,
It's up until February ninth, and I one hundred percent
scrambled for a minute to see if I can make
it out there, but my schedule is not being cooperative
(00:45):
with that plan, so I ordered a bunch of books
and spent a ton of time researching her instead. So
many thanks to my dear friend Kristen, who I adore,
for setting this idea in motion tomorrow. The Olimpica was
a trailblazer with an incredible, very fresh style that really
(01:05):
defined and influenced the Art Deco movement. She lived a
life that was focused on originality, both artistic and personally.
She is a lot of personality heads up as we
talk about her that there is very brief mention of
domestic violence in this episode. Tamara Gerwick Gorshka was born,
(01:26):
according to her own account, on May sixteenth, eighteen ninety eight,
probably in Warsaw, Poland. Her parents were Boris Gerwick Gorshki,
who was a lawyer, and Malvina Gurick Gorshka. As she
always told her personal story, her family moved to Moscow
and she was still very, very tiny, but there's really
(01:47):
been a lot of debate about whether that was the
case or whether she was actually born there after the
family moved. The timing of that move also suggests that
she would have been born several years ear earlier than
she actually claimed, so it's now believed that she was
actually born in eighteen ninety four. To add even more
(02:08):
confusion to the story of her entry into the world,
her first name appears in three different ways in addition
to Tamara. Sometimes this is recorded as Maria and other
times as Rosalia. There are also recorded entries where the
name is some combination of two or those three possible
(02:28):
first names. She had an older brother named Stanzik and
eventually a baby sister named Adrian. There are additional question
marks in Tamora's childhood, some of them quite tragic. Her father, Boris,
possibly died by suicide, although Tomorrow always stated that her
parents had divorced while she was still young. If you're
(02:49):
starting to think, wow, she told a lot of stories
that don't really always connect with what's verifiable that is accurate,
and you might want to just be accustomed to that.
Boris was not part of her life though. After her
very earliest years, regardless of the nature of the end
of the marriage, Malvina took her children and moved back
to Warsaw, where she had grown up and where her family,
(03:11):
which was quite wealthy, assisted in raising the children. As
a teenager, Tamara benefited from her relationship with her grandmother, Clementina,
in that the two of them traveled extensively together. Tamara
got a lot of exposure to arts and culture, and
because of her family's wealth, she was also able to
attend a Swiss finishing school while staying with relatives in
(03:34):
Saint Petersburg. Sometime between the ages of eighteen and twenty one,
Tomorrow met a young man named Todayus Lempiqui, and today
Us was handsome. He was a lawyer. He was very
prominent in the Saint Petersburg social scene, and the pair
quickly fell in love and got married. Things seemed perfect
(03:54):
at this point. The couple ran in very stylish and
wealthy circles, and today Us was on track together had
an appointment as a lawyer for the czar. But that
meant that when the Russian Revolution started in nineteen seventeen
and the Bolsheviks came to power, Today's was on the
wrong side of the revolution and he was arrested. The
(04:14):
exact reason is a little unclear. He was arrested in
the middle of the night, and Tomorrow was not told why.
Tomorrow's family had already left Poland, which was occupied, and
they had headed to Copenhagen, but Tomorrow's stayed in Saint Petersburg,
where the couple had been living, and looked for him.
She even visited prisons to see if he was there.
(04:34):
That didn't turn up anything, so she started asking anybody
she could for help, and finally got some assistance from
the Swedish consul. It's not really spelled out anywhere, but
it seems like she may have had an affair with
the consul. He promised that he was working on Today's case,
but also urged her to get out of Russia, which
(04:55):
she eventually agreed to. He got her to Finland and
then the Console returns to Russia with the promise that
he would keep working on freeing her husband. Tomorrow went
to Copenhagen and eventually the Console was able to secure
Todais's release. He was able to join his wife, and
from there they moved to Paris and sort of resettled there.
(05:17):
They had their daughter, Maria Christina. She was born in
Paris shortly after the move, and they called her Casette.
She would become a huge part not just of Tomorrow's life,
but also of her art. Yeah, there is some insinuation
in most biographies that that Console kind of was like, hey,
I will help you if you help me by sexual favors.
(05:43):
So Tracy just referenced Tamara's art career, and that art
career began in Paris. At this point, the family had nothing,
and it seems that Todayo's was really struggling regarding a job.
Tomorrow's sister Adrianne is often credited with advising her sibling.
This is written different ways, but basically, get a career
(06:07):
and you won't have to depend on your husband. And
this sort of makes it sound like today Is was
just kind of kicking around like a deadbeat, but it
is a lot more complicated than that. He had just
spent six weeks as a political prisoner, and he was
very changed by that experience. He was not the happy,
go lucky playboy that he had been when the couple met.
(06:28):
But Tamorrow also didn't have any patience for this change
in personality. Although she did step up to financially support
the family, Today's, for his part, was not kind to
her either. He turned down jobs that he was offered
because he felt they were beneath him, and this led
to arguing, and that arguing escalated to the point where
(06:50):
Today's became physically abusive. Both of these people were miserable
as she was looking for ways to bring in an
income through art. She was incredibly sad about doing so.
One of the things she did at this time was
to add the DA to her name to become Tamora Olimpica.
She had a strong knowledge of art from her travels
(07:10):
to museums around the world with her grandmother, but in
Paris she started studying art formally with Maurice Deni and
andrelt Lot was particularly influential on her, although she did
soon go past him in skill. According to an interview
with Tamara's great granddaughter and a state manager, Marisa d'limpica,
that was part of a short documentary prepared by the
(07:33):
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in connection with that
exhibit we mentioned at the top of the show, Tomorrow
once told her quote, you know, Marissa, when we left
Saint Petersburg, we had to flee. We lost our house,
we lost many of our friends, we lost all of
our possessions. We arrived in Paris with nothing. I decided
(07:53):
I was going to become the most important painter in Paris.
And after every painting I would sell, I would buy
myself a diamond bracelet. So that may sound like a
frivolous move, and certainly Tomorrow was a very showy human being.
She was like such a peacock in all the great ways.
(08:13):
But as her great granddaughter Marissa goes on to explain,
those purchases actually achieved two things. So one, that stack
of bracelets that did grow on her forearm telegraphed how
successful she was. And two those valuable pieces of jewelry
served as a sort of insurance policy. Tomorrow knew that
(08:34):
if her life once again turned on a dime like
it had in Russia and she was left with nothing,
she could use those bracelets as a potential financial cushion,
basically selling them off to live. After we take a
quick sponsor break, we'll talk about the way her career
really took off. By nineteen twenty two, Dlimpica was ready
(09:02):
to start showing her work. The first painting that she
became known for in Paris was portrait of a young
Lady in a blue dress. This is an image of
a woman named Ira Perrault, with whom Tamara had a
romantic relationship. This painting doesn't feature the very stylized appearance
(09:23):
that Dylmpica's work would eventually become known for. It shows
Ira from the waist up and she appears to be
sitting and wearing a very simple, drapy blue garment. It
says it's a blue dress. Honestly, it looks like a
piece of fabric draped across her. Era's dark hair is wavy,
it looks slightly tozzled. It's framing her face, and her
(09:43):
face has an orange red lip, and her dark eyes
are outlined with coal. Compared to Dlmpica's later work, it
looks quite naturalist. Another painting, portrait of a polo player,
is most likely a painting of her husband, Todaus. This
image is also a pretty straightforward portrait. The man that
(10:04):
it features is facing slightly down and away from the viewer,
so his eyes are shadowed and his expression is fairly neutral.
His clothes are shades of beijas, tans, and browns. Another
painting from her early showings once again shows a person
close to her life, this time her daughter Cosette. This
(10:25):
painting is called Portrait of a Little Girl with her
Teddy Bear, and it shows Cosette sitting down with her
teddy Bear seated next to her. One of her arms
is draped around the bear's shoulders. They kind of look
like they're sitting on a stupora set of stairs. This
painting is a little less detailed than the other two
we've mentioned, with more expressive brushstrokes that are still dramatic
(10:46):
in contrast, but they're often softer than in the era
in today's portraits. She doesn't use outlines in this one,
so all of the vibes are very soft on it. Overall,
Dlimpica's early works reflect the development of her personal style
after her studies with Denie who was a symbolist at
Loote who combined Cubism with more natural styles, and her
(11:10):
early art shows that she is working towards becoming a
unique voice in the Paris art scene. She later noted,
and she said this many times in a variety of ways,
my goal is never to copy, create a new style,
clear luminous colors and feel the elegance of the models.
Over the next several years, Stylmpica's singular style started to
(11:33):
really coll less in her work. Throughout the years from
nineteen twenty two to nineteen twenty four, she was showing
her work alongside other artists in salons, but just a
few years into her career, she also had her first
solo show that was in Milan. After the Milan exhibit,
Tamara's rise to fame as an artist was quite rapid.
(11:56):
She later attributed this speedy career progress to her technique
and style, noting quote, I was the first woman to
paint cleanly, and that was the basis of my success.
From one hundred pictures, mine will always stand out, and
so the galleries began to hang my work in their
best rooms, always in the middle, because my painting was attractive,
(12:19):
it was precise, it was finished. So she wasn't wrong
about aspects of this. Her work is very distinctive. I
will say, if I could just travel back in time
and bottle like a tenth of her confidence, that would
be spectacular. Yeah, that must be a great headspace to
live in. By the late nineteen twenties, she was making
(12:41):
enough money to purchase a home on Paris's Left Bank
and to have it renovated in very luxurious Art Deco style.
A big factor in that financial success and stability was
the patronage of doctor Pierre Bouchard, who had made a
fortune by inventing an indigestion cure, and he had purchased
some of Dlimpica's work before he offered her a two
(13:02):
year contract for a series of portraits of his family,
and she used the money from that deal to set
herself up in her home, including creating a very beautiful
studio to work in. Her lavish tastes were not isolated
to art and design, though Dlimpica became well known as
a party fixture, on the Paris social scene, and she
(13:25):
definitely engaged in a really sex, drugs and alcohol lifestyle.
She was a work hard, play hard kind of woman
who had an intense work ethic that meant she would
paint for nine to ten hours at a time and
then would unwind with some champagne in a massage before
heading out for the evening. She had affairs with both
(13:46):
women and men, and a lot of them became subjects
of her work. That work was inherently sexy. The subjects
always looked really glamorous. Her portraits of women show them
in very clingy, satiny garments, so they're by bodies are
really evident beneath their clothing. A lot of her paintings
are nudes, where she depicts women's bodies without making it
(14:08):
about the gaze of the viewer. These scenes are really
self contained, with the subjects looking anywhere but out from
the canvas. Yeah, even when her subjects were dressed, often
there would be like one breast peeking out, or you know,
you could totally see everything about their body in them.
(14:29):
Tamara had never been faithful to her husband. She told
friends a story of meeting a handsome man at a
reception just before her wedding, and then running into him
again shortly after she and Today's returned from their honeymoon
and starting an affair with him. That affair went on
for quite some time, and that was merely the beginning
(14:49):
of a long line of affairs and lovers. In a
lot of these cases, these were sort of long term affairs,
many of which seemed to go on sort of simultaneously.
One of her frequent painting subjects Ida Perrot, who we
mentioned earlier, was her girlfriend for years and years, but
she would have sort of intense periods where she saw
(15:10):
one person a whole lot, and then a different person
a whole lot, and kind of moves through all of
these people that were part of her circle. This unconventional
way of life is reflected in a quote of hers
that is often cited, quote, I live life in the
margins of society, and the rules of normal society don't apply.
In the margins. She often would just approach beautiful women
(15:33):
in the street and ask them to model for her,
and it was then not unusual for her to begin
sexual affairs with those models. But Today's was a lot
more socially conservative than his wife. He seems to have
tolerated all of Tomorrow's affairs for a while, although he
really didn't like them, but friction between the two of
(15:53):
them ultimately escalated to a point where the marriage ended.
This actually evidence is a double stated. In Tomorrow's life,
she had a lot of affairs but never left the marriage. Today's,
in contrast, met another woman, fell in love with her,
and then left Tomorrow. Tomorrow was really devastated and felt
completely betrayed. She begged him to reconcile, and eventually he
(16:16):
did agree and they tried again. The family went to
Monte Carlo, where Tomorrow often traveled with Casette, to see
if they could work things out, but instead they had
just a colossally huge fight in front of their daughter.
In that fight, he listed every infidelity that Tomorrow had
ever had in their marriage. She told him it was
(16:39):
just because he was weak and not enough, and that
was the end of that. A portrait of Today's that
Daylimpica had started working on in the late nineteen twenties
near the end of their marriage, includes one sad and
pretty telltale detail. The left hand, where his wedding ring
should have been is unfinished. Tomorrow's relationship with her daughter
(17:02):
through all of this was not great. Although she used
Cosette as a model for a lot of her paintings,
she wasn't exactly what you would call a loving mother.
She sometimes used her daughter almost as a prop in
her fabulous lifestyle, but then she wouldn't always acknowledge her
as her daughter publicly. She often told people while they
(17:23):
were out that Casette was her younger sister. In the
preface of a biography of Tomorrow that Casette worked on
with a co author named Charles Phillips, Phillips writes, quote,
as anyone who knew both Cosette and her mother will
tell you the two of them spent oft and on
a difficult half century together. Tamara was an artist and
(17:45):
a mother in that order, and her daughter's life, like
her own, was ruled by the dictum of what we
call below the artist's hunger work. Before all, although Dlimpica
had risen to fame in Europe, she was also quickly
sought after by clients in the United States, and at
the end of the nineteen twenties she traveled to New
(18:06):
York to work on several commissions. One of these commissions
was a wedding portrait of Joan Jeffrey, who was marrying
Rufus T. Bush. Both Joan and Rufus were from extremely
wealthy families. Joan's grandfather had made a fortune in the
early automobile industry, and Rufus's family made their money in
railway yards. The portrait, though, had a strange life. The
(18:31):
Bush marriage did not work out, and it ended in
divorce after only a few years. Dylympicus's painting went into
storage and it was forgotten. But hang on to that thread,
it will come back. Yes. Dlimpico was in New York
on October twenty eighth, nineteen twenty nine, Black Monday, when
the stock market crashed and sent the US headlong into
(18:53):
the Great Depression. The Depression happened at the same time
that a lot of European nations were also ex experiencing
economic strife. So the world that Tamorrow lived in, and
specifically the wealthy circles of luxurious partying, had again changed.
But unlike her experience in having to leave Saint Petersburg
with nothing, d Olimpica was able to weather the depression
(19:16):
and continued to paint and make a living as an artist.
In a moment, we'll talk about a few paintings from
Olympica's huge body of work. First, though, we'll hear from
the sponsors that keeps stuffiness in history class going. One
(19:41):
of the Olympica's most famous paintings is her Self Portrait
in a green Bugatti, created in nineteen twenty nine. This
painting is often regarded as an iconic piece of imagery
that shows a woman who is in charge of herself
and her future self possessed. It's a close up on
the artist from the point of view just outside the
(20:02):
driver's side door and a little in front of it.
She wears a sleek driving cap with a blonde curl
just emerging from it on each side. Her eyes look sly,
and her skin is a creamy white, and her pale
gray clothing is sort of piled around her. Aside from
the light green of the car body, the main pop
(20:22):
of color is the deep red of her lips. This
painting is a little bit claustrophobic in terms of it
feeling like a very small space, but it is also
incredibly striking. But it is very artificial in terms of
its subject matter. That Self Portrait was a commission for
the magazine Didama, a German women's magazine. It featured the
(20:45):
most modern of women and ideas. Dlimpica had met the
magazine's editor in Monte Carlo while she was on vacation,
and the commission was born of that meeting. But this
was not a version of Dlimpica that actually existed. She
didn't own a Bugatti. She drove her a know her
car was yellow, not green. She changed up these details
(21:08):
to create a piece of art that she thought would
be more alluring, but would also carefully portray her in
a way that was sort of personality propaganda. It made
her look wealthier than she really was, and colder portrait
makes her look like a woman that's really fully in
control of her life and her world, which is a
(21:28):
contrast to anybody's reality, really. But this was definitely true
of Dlimpica, who had created a life that was very
glittery and very glamorous, but also kind of primed for
turbulence because of all the drugs and alcohol in the
stream of lovers that she engaged with. This kind of
reminds me of we all have that friend who is
(21:50):
just always embroiled in a million dramas and they will
swear to you that they hate drama and they don't
tolerate it, and I'm like, but there's so much though
you cultivated. Another important painting in her ouvra is portrait
of Irra Pee, which she completed in nineteen thirty. This
(22:12):
one's really really striking because, aside from the subject's skin,
which has, you know, a faint kind of peachy cream tone,
the dominant tones of the painting are white, black, and red.
Ira is wearing a white clingy dress and she's holding
white caliiies, all of which is sharply contrasted with black shadowing.
(22:33):
But then there is a bright red scarf woven through
the image, and IRA's fingernails and lips are that same
color red. Dilipica created portrait of Marjorie Fairy in nineteen
thirty two. Like the portrait of Era we just mentioned,
the model is clad and white, but this image feels
more intimate and that the white is not clothing but
(22:55):
simply a cloth that's draped around the subject. Her body
is turned away from the viewer and she looks back
over her shoulder. Her blue eyes really jump off the
canvas in an icy stare. She has blonde hair, which
reflects the cubist influence of Tomorrow's early art education, because
it looks like it's almost made out of ribbon. There
(23:17):
is another interesting story of how Tamara ended up married
a second time, and it is actually tied to one
of her paintings. She had met the Hungarian baron Raoul
Kufner in her heyday. He was a fan and a patron,
and he had purchased a lot of her works before
they met. In the late nineteen twenties, Tamara painted a
(23:38):
portrait of the baron's then mistress, Nana de Herrera, as
a commission for the baron. This portrait was not especially flattering.
Delipica described not having been very inspired by her subject,
writing quote, when she came to my studio, she was
badly dressed. She was not elegant, she was not chiekh.
(23:58):
I thought, oh no, I don't want to paint her.
I can't believe that's the famous Nana de Herrera. In
her account, Tamoraw resolved to try to do the painting anyway,
and she details getting Nana to undress, in which state
she was per the artist a little more interesting to
look at. You can tell looking at this painting that
(24:20):
she was not very inspired. The most beautiful aspects of
it are the flowers that dot the scene. But this
painting is often referred to as an assassination on d
Lempica's part, because soon Nana was out of the picture
and the artist was the one dating the baron Tomorrow
married Koufner a few years later in nineteen thirty four.
(24:42):
Not long into her second marriage, Tamara's work started to
fall off. She showed some signs of depression and was
painting less and less as a result. The works she
did produce during this time were darker in tone and
less glamorous than her earlier paintings. It's as though the
indulgence of the Roaring twenties had really fueled her lifestyle,
(25:04):
and as that unsustainable lifestyle of constant parties and hedonism
faded in Paris, it took some of her spark with it.
One of her post nineteen twenties paintings, Beggar with Mandolin,
which she created in nineteen thirty five, reflects this shift.
It depicts an older man with white hair playing his mandolin.
(25:27):
His face is a lot more realistic than most of
her glamorous paintings, and his eyes, which look up and
to the left of the painting are sorrowful, and they're
set into a face that is puffy and wrinkled. He
wears many layers of clothing, and while he doesn't actually look,
as the title suggests, like someone destitute, the overall effect
(25:48):
is a sad one Gone is the glitzy verve of
her more famous works from the prior decade. I feel
like this is also all a reflection of the economic
crisis was happening global one hundred percent as World War
two looms tomorrow and the Baron decided to leave Europe
and moved to the United States. They bought a home
(26:09):
in Connecticut. Although Dalyimpica was really all the time on
the go, bouncing from coast to coast, she was still
very much in demand as an artist, and there were
multiple exhibitions of her work in Los Angeles and New York.
But once the United States entered into World War Two,
the art exhibitions really dwindled. Yeah, it wasn't just her.
(26:32):
Everybody was kind of you know, galleries were not staging
big exhibits anymore. It was not a time to worry
about that. Everybody was really focused on the war effort.
But then after the war Dlimpica, who was hoping to
find a new voice to match this new era, really foundered.
Her work moved into abstract paintings that shared some of
(26:53):
the shapes and line forms of her portraiture, but they
didn't generally feature any sort of subject and these did
not go over especially well. Like if someone wanted an
Olympica and they got this, it was not what they
were hoping for or anticipating, and her popularity really dwindled.
(27:13):
Earl died in nineteen sixty two after having a heart
attack aboard a cruise ship, and Tomorrow was really devastated.
The two of them had been married for thirty years
at that point. She really unmoored herself from the New
York scene completely. After he died, she sold all of
her things and started traveling constantly. She circled the globe
(27:35):
on a series of cruises three times actually, But if
she was looking for some sort of solace out in
the world, it does not seem like she found it.
After all of these cruises, she moved in with Cosette
and her husband and their two daughters. They were living
in Houston, Texas. She traded Casette pretty poorly while they
(27:56):
lived in Texas together. Tomorrow seemed to think that Casette
was her personal assistant and expected her to just handle
everything from her finances to her travel arrangements, while Tomorrow
tried to take over Casette's social circle. Even people who
were very close to Tomorrow during this time have acknowledged
that her behavior toward her daughter was hyper critical and
(28:19):
often really cruel. She dictated the way that Casette had
to dress and style her hair if she wanted to
be seen in public with her mother, and was just
generally very deeply controlling. Dalipica also seemed to go through
the kind of challenges that often befall people as they
age and struggle to find their way in an ever
(28:41):
changing world. She often bemoaned that her art was suffering
because she couldn't get the same kinds of art supplies
that she could purchase years earlier in Paris. She even
made her son in law, who was a scientist, mix
paints for her, but she was never pleased with the outcome,
and she also often stated that people had changed so
much from when she was young, and that they were
(29:03):
no longer stylish or educated, or that everyone was now
of poor breeding. In nineteen seventy two, there was a
retrospective exhibit of Tomorrow's works mounted in Paris, and this
breathed life into her career briefly, but it did not
garner the level of popularity that she probably hoped for. Then,
(29:24):
when there was a potential follow up exhibition in New York,
Tomorrow made a lot of demands about the gallery that
was interested in exhibiting her work, including that it would
have to knock through an exterior wall to put in
a new window. Her behavior really soured the gallery on
the deal. This New York exhibit never happened. In nineteen
(29:46):
seventy eight, Dilepica moved to Quernavaca, Mexico, to retire. She
had visited Quernavaca many times, and as her place in
the art worlds of New York, Paris and other cities
had dwindled, this had really begun where she went for solace.
She lived there the rest of her life, in a
home called Tris Bamboo. She often harangued Cosette to come
(30:09):
and visit her, and told her daughter that she felt abandoned,
but Cosette was dealing with her own family situation. Her
husband had cancer, and in prioritizing him in his care
Cosette had, according to Tamara, betrayed her mother. Dlimpica frequently
rewrote her will during this time, often cutting Cosette out
(30:30):
completely and insisting that her friends would instead get everything
when she died. When Cozette's husband, Harold died in nineteen
seventy nine, Cosette, whose daughters were grown, moved to Cornovaca
to be with her mother and take care of her
full time as her health was declining. It was just
a few months later, on March eighteenth, nineteen eighty, that
(30:52):
Tomorrow Olympic had died in her sleep. She had already
made all of the arrangements for her funeral and paid
for everything, but her final wish was to have her
ashes spread at the volcano pubol Kotta Pedal, which her
daughter and several of her friends managed to do by helicopter.
There have been a number of fairly triumphant codas to
(31:13):
tamorawd Olimpica's life and career since her passing. We mentioned
earlier that portrait of Missus Joan Jeffrey Bush that was forgotten.
That painting stayed stored away, untouched for almost six decades.
After Tomorrow's daughter, Cazette, published the first edition of her
book about her mother, Passion by Design, in nineteen eighty seven.
(31:35):
Jones's daughter read it and realized that their family might
still have that lost painting. That lost art, which wasn't
so much lost as just forgotten, was located and in
the intervening years commanded four point six million dollars at auction.
That auction took place more than twenty years ago, so
the value of the piece will have risen significantly. And
(31:58):
it is a very spectacular piece with the subject cladd
in red, and it almost looks like it could have
been painted in the nineteen eighties in the style of
Patrick Nagel. That story and another about a lost Olympica,
were shared by her great granddaughter, Marissa Olimpica in a
new forward to Casette's book when it was reissued in
(32:20):
twenty twenty. The second story of lost art is actually
one of a theft in two thousand and nine another
painting that Tamara made the same year as the portrait
of Missus Bush. This one, titled La Musicienne, was stolen
from the sharing a museum of realist art in the Netherlands.
(32:40):
That theft included another painting, which was Adolescence by Salvador Dali.
In a remarkable twist, though these two artworks are in
the tiny single digit percentage of stolen art that's actually
successfully recovered. Both of them were found by private investigator
Arthur Brand, who specializes in art recovery, and was able
(33:01):
to locate the work in the hands of a criminal
organization and negotiate with them to get them back. I
really feel like we've talked about something that Arthur Brand
has recovered on Unearthed before, probably because his name pops
up everywhere when you talk about art. He did a
season on Criminalia of Art Heist and he came up
several times. Yeah. So this piece was also sold at
(33:23):
auction in twenty eighteen for a whopping nine million dollars.
In February twenty twenty, Christie's put Delympica's nineteen thirty two
painting portrait of Marjorie Ferry up for auction with an
expected range of eight million to twelve million pounds where
they thought it was going to sell, it sold for
(33:43):
sixteen million, three hundred and eighty thousand pounds equivalent to
twenty one point two million dollars. The only other woman
artist who has sold a piece for more than that
is Georgio Keef, who's Jimson Weed slash White Flower Number
one sold her forty four zero point four million in
twenty fourteen. Not all the modern critics of her work
(34:05):
have been ebulliant, however, In two thousand and four, Fiona
McCarthy wrote in The Guardian quote Daylimpica 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
(34:26):
of authoritarian discipline. When she paints the Duchess de la Salle,
the Duchess is in jack boots, 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 d Olympica's best work. Uh So,
(34:47):
even in the beauty some see a very clear dark note.
Dlimpica continues to captivate and inspire today. Uh Madonna has
used her art immuse videos and a stage decor in
live shows. So if you are a fan of Madonna,
you've seen Olympica's work for sure, but she has also
(35:08):
inspired fashion like the Giorgio Armani preve Fall Winter twenty
twenty two twenty twenty three collection, and there have been
stage adaptations of her life story, and last year a
documentary about her titled The True Story of Tamara d
Olimpica and the Art of Survival that is limited enough
availability that I have not been able to see it. Dlimpica,
(35:31):
while she is a very complicated character, remains very iconic,
and her work is instantly recognizable, and she has a
lot of very dedicated fans, all of which probably would
have delighted her. Do you also have some listener mail?
You know that I do. This listener mail is in
(35:52):
fact about Christmas. This is from our listener Kira. I
hope I am saying your name correctly. Who writes Hi?
Tracy and Holly, thank you for all the wonderful hours
of entertainment and knowledge. I just listened to your episode
on Christmas decorations. I have never had a Christmas Eve
without live candles on the tree. Live candles are still
(36:15):
very common in Denmark, with about forty percent of households
having live candles on the Christmas tree. While it is
more dangerous than electric lights, I want to share why
it is not as dangerous as it might seem. The
lights are special Christmas tree lights, slightly larger than a
birthday cake light, with wings that stop about a centimeter
(36:35):
before the end of the candle, thus preventing the candles
from burning down. We usually only put up our tree
on the twenty third so it is still fresh. We
never leave a tree with lights on without observation and
always have a bucket of water, etc. Close by. Never
had to use it. For me, the lighting of the
Christmas tree is the most special part of Christmas. While
(36:58):
I see the tree during the day, in the evening,
everyone goes into a different room while one person lights
the tree. Then we all go in to look at
the tree and join hands. I'm choked up. This sounds
so sweet walking around the Christmas tree singing Christmas songs
and carols. Beautiful. Kira attached photos of her tree. There's
also a sparkler on top, which is, she says, a
(37:21):
tradition in her family, but less common in general. It's very,
very beautiful, I will say, and her kids look just
full of wonder. It also still terrifies me. I don't
know if I have just grown up in the the
US era of UL safety tags on everything that tell
me that it's all going to go up in flames
that I'm like, I don't know, but it's so beautiful.
(37:44):
I completely understand. And it is one of those things
where I bet if it is something that happens for
like an hour in the evening, it feels extra magical
and beautiful. So thank you, thank you, thank you so
much for sharing this with us. It got me choked up.
It's so sweet and it is quite quite beautiful. Even
if I'm scared, you can write to us and make
me cry. If you'd like a history podcast at iHeartRadio
(38:06):
dot com. You can also subscribe to the podcast on
the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(38:26):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today we're going
to talk about an artist who has kind of been
on my radar for a while, but definitely as a
(00:22):
bit of a backgrounder. And then one of my very
dearest friends suggested her because there is a really fabulous
exhibit of her work going on at the DeYoung Museum
in San Francisco right now, not for a whole lot longer,
It's up until February ninth, and I one hundred percent
scrambled for a minute to see if I can make
it out there, but my schedule is not being cooperative
(00:45):
with that plan, so I ordered a bunch of books
and spent a ton of time researching her instead. So
many thanks to my dear friend Kristen, who I adore,
for setting this idea in motion tomorrow. The Olimpica was
a trailblazer with an incredible, very fresh style that really
(01:05):
defined and influenced the Art Deco movement. She lived a
life that was focused on originality, both artistic and personally.
She is a lot of personality heads up as we
talk about her that there is very brief mention of
domestic violence in this episode. Tamara Gerwick Gorshka was born,
(01:26):
according to her own account, on May sixteenth, eighteen ninety eight,
probably in Warsaw, Poland. Her parents were Boris Gerwick Gorshki,
who was a lawyer, and Malvina Gurick Gorshka. As she
always told her personal story, her family moved to Moscow
and she was still very, very tiny, but there's really
(01:47):
been a lot of debate about whether that was the
case or whether she was actually born there after the
family moved. The timing of that move also suggests that
she would have been born several years ear earlier than
she actually claimed, so it's now believed that she was
actually born in eighteen ninety four. To add even more
(02:08):
confusion to the story of her entry into the world,
her first name appears in three different ways in addition
to Tamara. Sometimes this is recorded as Maria and other
times as Rosalia. There are also recorded entries where the
name is some combination of two or those three possible
(02:28):
first names. She had an older brother named Stanzik and
eventually a baby sister named Adrian. There are additional question
marks in Tamora's childhood, some of them quite tragic. Her father, Boris,
possibly died by suicide, although Tomorrow always stated that her
parents had divorced while she was still young. If you're
(02:49):
starting to think, wow, she told a lot of stories
that don't really always connect with what's verifiable that is accurate,
and you might want to just be accustomed to that.
Boris was not part of her life though. After her
very earliest years, regardless of the nature of the end
of the marriage, Malvina took her children and moved back
to Warsaw, where she had grown up and where her family,
(03:11):
which was quite wealthy, assisted in raising the children. As
a teenager, Tamara benefited from her relationship with her grandmother, Clementina,
in that the two of them traveled extensively together. Tamara
got a lot of exposure to arts and culture, and
because of her family's wealth, she was also able to
attend a Swiss finishing school while staying with relatives in
(03:34):
Saint Petersburg. Sometime between the ages of eighteen and twenty one,
Tomorrow met a young man named Todayus Lempiqui, and today
Us was handsome. He was a lawyer. He was very
prominent in the Saint Petersburg social scene, and the pair
quickly fell in love and got married. Things seemed perfect
(03:54):
at this point. The couple ran in very stylish and
wealthy circles, and today Us was on track together had
an appointment as a lawyer for the czar. But that
meant that when the Russian Revolution started in nineteen seventeen
and the Bolsheviks came to power, Today's was on the
wrong side of the revolution and he was arrested. The
(04:14):
exact reason is a little unclear. He was arrested in
the middle of the night, and Tomorrow was not told why.
Tomorrow's family had already left Poland, which was occupied, and
they had headed to Copenhagen, but Tomorrow's stayed in Saint Petersburg,
where the couple had been living, and looked for him.
She even visited prisons to see if he was there.
(04:34):
That didn't turn up anything, so she started asking anybody
she could for help, and finally got some assistance from
the Swedish consul. It's not really spelled out anywhere, but
it seems like she may have had an affair with
the consul. He promised that he was working on Today's case,
but also urged her to get out of Russia, which
(04:55):
she eventually agreed to. He got her to Finland and
then the Console returns to Russia with the promise that
he would keep working on freeing her husband. Tomorrow went
to Copenhagen and eventually the Console was able to secure
Todais's release. He was able to join his wife, and
from there they moved to Paris and sort of resettled there.
(05:17):
They had their daughter, Maria Christina. She was born in
Paris shortly after the move, and they called her Casette.
She would become a huge part not just of Tomorrow's life,
but also of her art. Yeah, there is some insinuation
in most biographies that that Console kind of was like, hey,
I will help you if you help me by sexual favors.
(05:43):
So Tracy just referenced Tamara's art career, and that art
career began in Paris. At this point, the family had nothing,
and it seems that Todayo's was really struggling regarding a job.
Tomorrow's sister Adrianne is often credited with advising her sibling.
This is written different ways, but basically, get a career
(06:07):
and you won't have to depend on your husband. And
this sort of makes it sound like today Is was
just kind of kicking around like a deadbeat, but it
is a lot more complicated than that. He had just
spent six weeks as a political prisoner, and he was
very changed by that experience. He was not the happy,
go lucky playboy that he had been when the couple met.
(06:28):
But Tamorrow also didn't have any patience for this change
in personality. Although she did step up to financially support
the family, Today's, for his part, was not kind to
her either. He turned down jobs that he was offered
because he felt they were beneath him, and this led
to arguing, and that arguing escalated to the point where
(06:50):
Today's became physically abusive. Both of these people were miserable
as she was looking for ways to bring in an
income through art. She was incredibly sad about doing so.
One of the things she did at this time was
to add the DA to her name to become Tamora Olimpica.
She had a strong knowledge of art from her travels
(07:10):
to museums around the world with her grandmother, but in
Paris she started studying art formally with Maurice Deni and
andrelt Lot was particularly influential on her, although she did
soon go past him in skill. According to an interview
with Tamara's great granddaughter and a state manager, Marisa d'limpica,
that was part of a short documentary prepared by the
(07:33):
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in connection with that
exhibit we mentioned at the top of the show, Tomorrow
once told her quote, you know, Marissa, when we left
Saint Petersburg, we had to flee. We lost our house,
we lost many of our friends, we lost all of
our possessions. We arrived in Paris with nothing. I decided
(07:53):
I was going to become the most important painter in Paris.
And after every painting I would sell, I would buy
myself a diamond bracelet. So that may sound like a
frivolous move, and certainly Tomorrow was a very showy human being.
She was like such a peacock in all the great ways.
(08:13):
But as her great granddaughter Marissa goes on to explain,
those purchases actually achieved two things. So one, that stack
of bracelets that did grow on her forearm telegraphed how
successful she was. And two those valuable pieces of jewelry
served as a sort of insurance policy. Tomorrow knew that
(08:34):
if her life once again turned on a dime like
it had in Russia and she was left with nothing,
she could use those bracelets as a potential financial cushion,
basically selling them off to live. After we take a
quick sponsor break, we'll talk about the way her career
really took off. By nineteen twenty two, Dlimpica was ready
(09:02):
to start showing her work. The first painting that she
became known for in Paris was portrait of a young
Lady in a blue dress. This is an image of
a woman named Ira Perrault, with whom Tamara had a
romantic relationship. This painting doesn't feature the very stylized appearance
(09:23):
that Dylmpica's work would eventually become known for. It shows
Ira from the waist up and she appears to be
sitting and wearing a very simple, drapy blue garment. It
says it's a blue dress. Honestly, it looks like a
piece of fabric draped across her. Era's dark hair is wavy,
it looks slightly tozzled. It's framing her face, and her
(09:43):
face has an orange red lip, and her dark eyes
are outlined with coal. Compared to Dlmpica's later work, it
looks quite naturalist. Another painting, portrait of a polo player,
is most likely a painting of her husband, Todaus. This
image is also a pretty straightforward portrait. The man that
(10:04):
it features is facing slightly down and away from the viewer,
so his eyes are shadowed and his expression is fairly neutral.
His clothes are shades of beijas, tans, and browns. Another
painting from her early showings once again shows a person
close to her life, this time her daughter Cosette. This
(10:25):
painting is called Portrait of a Little Girl with her
Teddy Bear, and it shows Cosette sitting down with her
teddy Bear seated next to her. One of her arms
is draped around the bear's shoulders. They kind of look
like they're sitting on a stupora set of stairs. This
painting is a little less detailed than the other two
we've mentioned, with more expressive brushstrokes that are still dramatic
(10:46):
in contrast, but they're often softer than in the era
in today's portraits. She doesn't use outlines in this one,
so all of the vibes are very soft on it. Overall,
Dlimpica's early works reflect the development of her personal style
after her studies with Denie who was a symbolist at
Loote who combined Cubism with more natural styles, and her
(11:10):
early art shows that she is working towards becoming a
unique voice in the Paris art scene. She later noted,
and she said this many times in a variety of ways,
my goal is never to copy, create a new style,
clear luminous colors and feel the elegance of the models.
Over the next several years, Stylmpica's singular style started to
(11:33):
really coll less in her work. Throughout the years from
nineteen twenty two to nineteen twenty four, she was showing
her work alongside other artists in salons, but just a
few years into her career, she also had her first
solo show that was in Milan. After the Milan exhibit,
Tamara's rise to fame as an artist was quite rapid.
(11:56):
She later attributed this speedy career progress to her technique
and style, noting quote, I was the first woman to
paint cleanly, and that was the basis of my success.
From one hundred pictures, mine will always stand out, and
so the galleries began to hang my work in their
best rooms, always in the middle, because my painting was attractive,
(12:19):
it was precise, it was finished. So she wasn't wrong
about aspects of this. Her work is very distinctive. I
will say, if I could just travel back in time
and bottle like a tenth of her confidence, that would
be spectacular. Yeah, that must be a great headspace to
live in. By the late nineteen twenties, she was making
(12:41):
enough money to purchase a home on Paris's Left Bank
and to have it renovated in very luxurious Art Deco style.
A big factor in that financial success and stability was
the patronage of doctor Pierre Bouchard, who had made a
fortune by inventing an indigestion cure, and he had purchased
some of Dlimpica's work before he offered her a two
(13:02):
year contract for a series of portraits of his family,
and she used the money from that deal to set
herself up in her home, including creating a very beautiful
studio to work in. Her lavish tastes were not isolated
to art and design, though Dlimpica became well known as
a party fixture, on the Paris social scene, and she
(13:25):
definitely engaged in a really sex, drugs and alcohol lifestyle.
She was a work hard, play hard kind of woman
who had an intense work ethic that meant she would
paint for nine to ten hours at a time and
then would unwind with some champagne in a massage before
heading out for the evening. She had affairs with both
(13:46):
women and men, and a lot of them became subjects
of her work. That work was inherently sexy. The subjects
always looked really glamorous. Her portraits of women show them
in very clingy, satiny garments, so they're by bodies are
really evident beneath their clothing. A lot of her paintings
are nudes, where she depicts women's bodies without making it
(14:08):
about the gaze of the viewer. These scenes are really
self contained, with the subjects looking anywhere but out from
the canvas. Yeah, even when her subjects were dressed, often
there would be like one breast peeking out, or you know,
you could totally see everything about their body in them.
(14:29):
Tamara had never been faithful to her husband. She told
friends a story of meeting a handsome man at a
reception just before her wedding, and then running into him
again shortly after she and Today's returned from their honeymoon
and starting an affair with him. That affair went on
for quite some time, and that was merely the beginning
(14:49):
of a long line of affairs and lovers. In a
lot of these cases, these were sort of long term affairs,
many of which seemed to go on sort of simultaneously.
One of her frequent painting subjects Ida Perrot, who we
mentioned earlier, was her girlfriend for years and years, but
she would have sort of intense periods where she saw
(15:10):
one person a whole lot, and then a different person
a whole lot, and kind of moves through all of
these people that were part of her circle. This unconventional
way of life is reflected in a quote of hers
that is often cited, quote, I live life in the
margins of society, and the rules of normal society don't apply.
In the margins. She often would just approach beautiful women
(15:33):
in the street and ask them to model for her,
and it was then not unusual for her to begin
sexual affairs with those models. But Today's was a lot
more socially conservative than his wife. He seems to have
tolerated all of Tomorrow's affairs for a while, although he
really didn't like them, but friction between the two of
(15:53):
them ultimately escalated to a point where the marriage ended.
This actually evidence is a double stated. In Tomorrow's life,
she had a lot of affairs but never left the marriage. Today's,
in contrast, met another woman, fell in love with her,
and then left Tomorrow. Tomorrow was really devastated and felt
completely betrayed. She begged him to reconcile, and eventually he
(16:16):
did agree and they tried again. The family went to
Monte Carlo, where Tomorrow often traveled with Casette, to see
if they could work things out, but instead they had
just a colossally huge fight in front of their daughter.
In that fight, he listed every infidelity that Tomorrow had
ever had in their marriage. She told him it was
(16:39):
just because he was weak and not enough, and that
was the end of that. A portrait of Today's that
Daylimpica had started working on in the late nineteen twenties
near the end of their marriage, includes one sad and
pretty telltale detail. The left hand, where his wedding ring
should have been is unfinished. Tomorrow's relationship with her daughter
(17:02):
through all of this was not great. Although she used
Cosette as a model for a lot of her paintings,
she wasn't exactly what you would call a loving mother.
She sometimes used her daughter almost as a prop in
her fabulous lifestyle, but then she wouldn't always acknowledge her
as her daughter publicly. She often told people while they
(17:23):
were out that Casette was her younger sister. In the
preface of a biography of Tomorrow that Casette worked on
with a co author named Charles Phillips, Phillips writes, quote,
as anyone who knew both Cosette and her mother will
tell you the two of them spent oft and on
a difficult half century together. Tamara was an artist and
(17:45):
a mother in that order, and her daughter's life, like
her own, was ruled by the dictum of what we
call below the artist's hunger work. Before all, although Dlimpica
had risen to fame in Europe, she was also quickly
sought after by clients in the United States, and at
the end of the nineteen twenties she traveled to New
(18:06):
York to work on several commissions. One of these commissions
was a wedding portrait of Joan Jeffrey, who was marrying
Rufus T. Bush. Both Joan and Rufus were from extremely
wealthy families. Joan's grandfather had made a fortune in the
early automobile industry, and Rufus's family made their money in
railway yards. The portrait, though, had a strange life. The
(18:31):
Bush marriage did not work out, and it ended in
divorce after only a few years. Dylympicus's painting went into
storage and it was forgotten. But hang on to that thread,
it will come back. Yes. Dlimpico was in New York
on October twenty eighth, nineteen twenty nine, Black Monday, when
the stock market crashed and sent the US headlong into
(18:53):
the Great Depression. The Depression happened at the same time
that a lot of European nations were also ex experiencing
economic strife. So the world that Tamorrow lived in, and
specifically the wealthy circles of luxurious partying, had again changed.
But unlike her experience in having to leave Saint Petersburg
with nothing, d Olimpica was able to weather the depression
(19:16):
and continued to paint and make a living as an artist.
In a moment, we'll talk about a few paintings from
Olympica's huge body of work. First, though, we'll hear from
the sponsors that keeps stuffiness in history class going. One
(19:41):
of the Olympica's most famous paintings is her Self Portrait
in a green Bugatti, created in nineteen twenty nine. This
painting is often regarded as an iconic piece of imagery
that shows a woman who is in charge of herself
and her future self possessed. It's a close up on
the artist from the point of view just outside the
(20:02):
driver's side door and a little in front of it.
She wears a sleek driving cap with a blonde curl
just emerging from it on each side. Her eyes look sly,
and her skin is a creamy white, and her pale
gray clothing is sort of piled around her. Aside from
the light green of the car body, the main pop
(20:22):
of color is the deep red of her lips. This
painting is a little bit claustrophobic in terms of it
feeling like a very small space, but it is also
incredibly striking. But it is very artificial in terms of
its subject matter. That Self Portrait was a commission for
the magazine Didama, a German women's magazine. It featured the
(20:45):
most modern of women and ideas. Dlimpica had met the
magazine's editor in Monte Carlo while she was on vacation,
and the commission was born of that meeting. But this
was not a version of Dlimpica that actually existed. She
didn't own a Bugatti. She drove her a know her
car was yellow, not green. She changed up these details
(21:08):
to create a piece of art that she thought would
be more alluring, but would also carefully portray her in
a way that was sort of personality propaganda. It made
her look wealthier than she really was, and colder portrait
makes her look like a woman that's really fully in
control of her life and her world, which is a
(21:28):
contrast to anybody's reality, really. But this was definitely true
of Dlimpica, who had created a life that was very
glittery and very glamorous, but also kind of primed for
turbulence because of all the drugs and alcohol in the
stream of lovers that she engaged with. This kind of
reminds me of we all have that friend who is
(21:50):
just always embroiled in a million dramas and they will
swear to you that they hate drama and they don't
tolerate it, and I'm like, but there's so much though
you cultivated. Another important painting in her ouvra is portrait
of Irra Pee, which she completed in nineteen thirty. This
(22:12):
one's really really striking because, aside from the subject's skin,
which has, you know, a faint kind of peachy cream tone,
the dominant tones of the painting are white, black, and red.
Ira is wearing a white clingy dress and she's holding
white caliiies, all of which is sharply contrasted with black shadowing.
(22:33):
But then there is a bright red scarf woven through
the image, and IRA's fingernails and lips are that same
color red. Dilipica created portrait of Marjorie Fairy in nineteen
thirty two. Like the portrait of Era we just mentioned,
the model is clad and white, but this image feels
more intimate and that the white is not clothing but
(22:55):
simply a cloth that's draped around the subject. Her body
is turned away from the viewer and she looks back
over her shoulder. Her blue eyes really jump off the
canvas in an icy stare. She has blonde hair, which
reflects the cubist influence of Tomorrow's early art education, because
it looks like it's almost made out of ribbon. There
(23:17):
is another interesting story of how Tamara ended up married
a second time, and it is actually tied to one
of her paintings. She had met the Hungarian baron Raoul
Kufner in her heyday. He was a fan and a patron,
and he had purchased a lot of her works before
they met. In the late nineteen twenties, Tamara painted a
(23:38):
portrait of the baron's then mistress, Nana de Herrera, as
a commission for the baron. This portrait was not especially flattering.
Delipica described not having been very inspired by her subject,
writing quote, when she came to my studio, she was
badly dressed. She was not elegant, she was not chiekh.
(23:58):
I thought, oh no, I don't want to paint her.
I can't believe that's the famous Nana de Herrera. In
her account, Tamoraw resolved to try to do the painting anyway,
and she details getting Nana to undress, in which state
she was per the artist a little more interesting to
look at. You can tell looking at this painting that
(24:20):
she was not very inspired. The most beautiful aspects of
it are the flowers that dot the scene. But this
painting is often referred to as an assassination on d
Lempica's part, because soon Nana was out of the picture
and the artist was the one dating the baron Tomorrow
married Koufner a few years later in nineteen thirty four.
(24:42):
Not long into her second marriage, Tamara's work started to
fall off. She showed some signs of depression and was
painting less and less as a result. The works she
did produce during this time were darker in tone and
less glamorous than her earlier paintings. It's as though the
indulgence of the Roaring twenties had really fueled her lifestyle,
(25:04):
and as that unsustainable lifestyle of constant parties and hedonism
faded in Paris, it took some of her spark with it.
One of her post nineteen twenties paintings, Beggar with Mandolin,
which she created in nineteen thirty five, reflects this shift.
It depicts an older man with white hair playing his mandolin.
(25:27):
His face is a lot more realistic than most of
her glamorous paintings, and his eyes, which look up and
to the left of the painting are sorrowful, and they're
set into a face that is puffy and wrinkled. He
wears many layers of clothing, and while he doesn't actually look,
as the title suggests, like someone destitute, the overall effect
(25:48):
is a sad one Gone is the glitzy verve of
her more famous works from the prior decade. I feel
like this is also all a reflection of the economic
crisis was happening global one hundred percent as World War
two looms tomorrow and the Baron decided to leave Europe
and moved to the United States. They bought a home
(26:09):
in Connecticut. Although Dalyimpica was really all the time on
the go, bouncing from coast to coast, she was still
very much in demand as an artist, and there were
multiple exhibitions of her work in Los Angeles and New York.
But once the United States entered into World War Two,
the art exhibitions really dwindled. Yeah, it wasn't just her.
(26:32):
Everybody was kind of you know, galleries were not staging
big exhibits anymore. It was not a time to worry
about that. Everybody was really focused on the war effort.
But then after the war Dlimpica, who was hoping to
find a new voice to match this new era, really foundered.
Her work moved into abstract paintings that shared some of
(26:53):
the shapes and line forms of her portraiture, but they
didn't generally feature any sort of subject and these did
not go over especially well. Like if someone wanted an
Olympica and they got this, it was not what they
were hoping for or anticipating, and her popularity really dwindled.
(27:13):
Earl died in nineteen sixty two after having a heart
attack aboard a cruise ship, and Tomorrow was really devastated.
The two of them had been married for thirty years
at that point. She really unmoored herself from the New
York scene completely. After he died, she sold all of
her things and started traveling constantly. She circled the globe
(27:35):
on a series of cruises three times actually, But if
she was looking for some sort of solace out in
the world, it does not seem like she found it.
After all of these cruises, she moved in with Cosette
and her husband and their two daughters. They were living
in Houston, Texas. She traded Casette pretty poorly while they
(27:56):
lived in Texas together. Tomorrow seemed to think that Casette
was her personal assistant and expected her to just handle
everything from her finances to her travel arrangements, while Tomorrow
tried to take over Casette's social circle. Even people who
were very close to Tomorrow during this time have acknowledged
that her behavior toward her daughter was hyper critical and
(28:19):
often really cruel. She dictated the way that Casette had
to dress and style her hair if she wanted to
be seen in public with her mother, and was just
generally very deeply controlling. Dalipica also seemed to go through
the kind of challenges that often befall people as they
age and struggle to find their way in an ever
(28:41):
changing world. She often bemoaned that her art was suffering
because she couldn't get the same kinds of art supplies
that she could purchase years earlier in Paris. She even
made her son in law, who was a scientist, mix
paints for her, but she was never pleased with the outcome,
and she also often stated that people had changed so
much from when she was young, and that they were
(29:03):
no longer stylish or educated, or that everyone was now
of poor breeding. In nineteen seventy two, there was a
retrospective exhibit of Tomorrow's works mounted in Paris, and this
breathed life into her career briefly, but it did not
garner the level of popularity that she probably hoped for. Then,
(29:24):
when there was a potential follow up exhibition in New York,
Tomorrow made a lot of demands about the gallery that
was interested in exhibiting her work, including that it would
have to knock through an exterior wall to put in
a new window. Her behavior really soured the gallery on
the deal. This New York exhibit never happened. In nineteen
(29:46):
seventy eight, Dilepica moved to Quernavaca, Mexico, to retire. She
had visited Quernavaca many times, and as her place in
the art worlds of New York, Paris and other cities
had dwindled, this had really begun where she went for solace.
She lived there the rest of her life, in a
home called Tris Bamboo. She often harangued Cosette to come
(30:09):
and visit her, and told her daughter that she felt abandoned,
but Cosette was dealing with her own family situation. Her
husband had cancer, and in prioritizing him in his care
Cosette had, according to Tamara, betrayed her mother. Dlimpica frequently
rewrote her will during this time, often cutting Cosette out
(30:30):
completely and insisting that her friends would instead get everything
when she died. When Cozette's husband, Harold died in nineteen
seventy nine, Cosette, whose daughters were grown, moved to Cornovaca
to be with her mother and take care of her
full time as her health was declining. It was just
a few months later, on March eighteenth, nineteen eighty, that
(30:52):
Tomorrow Olympic had died in her sleep. She had already
made all of the arrangements for her funeral and paid
for everything, but her final wish was to have her
ashes spread at the volcano pubol Kotta Pedal, which her
daughter and several of her friends managed to do by helicopter.
There have been a number of fairly triumphant codas to
(31:13):
tamorawd Olimpica's life and career since her passing. We mentioned
earlier that portrait of Missus Joan Jeffrey Bush that was forgotten.
That painting stayed stored away, untouched for almost six decades.
After Tomorrow's daughter, Cazette, published the first edition of her
book about her mother, Passion by Design, in nineteen eighty seven.
(31:35):
Jones's daughter read it and realized that their family might
still have that lost painting. That lost art, which wasn't
so much lost as just forgotten, was located and in
the intervening years commanded four point six million dollars at auction.
That auction took place more than twenty years ago, so
the value of the piece will have risen significantly. And
(31:58):
it is a very spectacular piece with the subject cladd
in red, and it almost looks like it could have
been painted in the nineteen eighties in the style of
Patrick Nagel. That story and another about a lost Olympica,
were shared by her great granddaughter, Marissa Olimpica in a
new forward to Casette's book when it was reissued in
(32:20):
twenty twenty. The second story of lost art is actually
one of a theft in two thousand and nine another
painting that Tamara made the same year as the portrait
of Missus Bush. This one, titled La Musicienne, was stolen
from the sharing a museum of realist art in the Netherlands.
(32:40):
That theft included another painting, which was Adolescence by Salvador Dali.
In a remarkable twist, though these two artworks are in
the tiny single digit percentage of stolen art that's actually
successfully recovered. Both of them were found by private investigator
Arthur Brand, who specializes in art recovery, and was able
(33:01):
to locate the work in the hands of a criminal
organization and negotiate with them to get them back. I
really feel like we've talked about something that Arthur Brand
has recovered on Unearthed before, probably because his name pops
up everywhere when you talk about art. He did a
season on Criminalia of Art Heist and he came up
several times. Yeah. So this piece was also sold at
(33:23):
auction in twenty eighteen for a whopping nine million dollars.
In February twenty twenty, Christie's put Delympica's nineteen thirty two
painting portrait of Marjorie Ferry up for auction with an
expected range of eight million to twelve million pounds where
they thought it was going to sell, it sold for
(33:43):
sixteen million, three hundred and eighty thousand pounds equivalent to
twenty one point two million dollars. The only other woman
artist who has sold a piece for more than that
is Georgio Keef, who's Jimson Weed slash White Flower Number
one sold her forty four zero point four million in
twenty fourteen. Not all the modern critics of her work
(34:05):
have been ebulliant, however, In two thousand and four, Fiona
McCarthy wrote in The Guardian quote Daylimpica 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
(34:26):
of authoritarian discipline. When she paints the Duchess de la Salle,
the Duchess is in jack boots, 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 d Olympica's best work. Uh So,
(34:47):
even in the beauty some see a very clear dark note.
Dlimpica continues to captivate and inspire today. Uh Madonna has
used her art immuse videos and a stage decor in
live shows. So if you are a fan of Madonna,
you've seen Olympica's work for sure, but she has also
(35:08):
inspired fashion like the Giorgio Armani preve Fall Winter twenty
twenty two twenty twenty three collection, and there have been
stage adaptations of her life story, and last year a
documentary about her titled The True Story of Tamara d
Olimpica and the Art of Survival that is limited enough
availability that I have not been able to see it. Dlimpica,
(35:31):
while she is a very complicated character, remains very iconic,
and her work is instantly recognizable, and she has a
lot of very dedicated fans, all of which probably would
have delighted her. Do you also have some listener mail?
You know that I do. This listener mail is in
(35:52):
fact about Christmas. This is from our listener Kira. I
hope I am saying your name correctly. Who writes Hi?
Tracy and Holly, thank you for all the wonderful hours
of entertainment and knowledge. I just listened to your episode
on Christmas decorations. I have never had a Christmas Eve
without live candles on the tree. Live candles are still
(36:15):
very common in Denmark, with about forty percent of households
having live candles on the Christmas tree. While it is
more dangerous than electric lights, I want to share why
it is not as dangerous as it might seem. The
lights are special Christmas tree lights, slightly larger than a
birthday cake light, with wings that stop about a centimeter
(36:35):
before the end of the candle, thus preventing the candles
from burning down. We usually only put up our tree
on the twenty third so it is still fresh. We
never leave a tree with lights on without observation and
always have a bucket of water, etc. Close by. Never
had to use it. For me, the lighting of the
Christmas tree is the most special part of Christmas. While
(36:58):
I see the tree during the day, in the evening,
everyone goes into a different room while one person lights
the tree. Then we all go in to look at
the tree and join hands. I'm choked up. This sounds
so sweet walking around the Christmas tree singing Christmas songs
and carols. Beautiful. Kira attached photos of her tree. There's
also a sparkler on top, which is, she says, a
(37:21):
tradition in her family, but less common in general. It's very,
very beautiful, I will say, and her kids look just
full of wonder. It also still terrifies me. I don't
know if I have just grown up in the the
US era of UL safety tags on everything that tell
me that it's all going to go up in flames
that I'm like, I don't know, but it's so beautiful.
(37:44):
I completely understand. And it is one of those things
where I bet if it is something that happens for
like an hour in the evening, it feels extra magical
and beautiful. So thank you, thank you, thank you so
much for sharing this with us. It got me choked up.
It's so sweet and it is quite quite beautiful. Even
if I'm scared, you can write to us and make
me cry. If you'd like a history podcast at iHeartRadio
(38:06):
dot com. You can also subscribe to the podcast on
the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(38:26):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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