Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (14 page)

Naive and blind as Tamara had been, however, she was brave in the days that followed. She knew the Cheka might return for her – wives who remained loyal to their counter-revolutionary husbands were also in danger of incarceration. Even if she managed to evade arrest, she was still alone in a city where survival was becoming more precarious by the day. Her servants had run away; she didn’t know how to obtain food and coal, she didn’t even know how long she could stay in her own apartment, given the campaign of targeted evictions already underway.

Her natural impulse might have been to flee Russia and join her family in Copenhagen, yet she was determined to find help for Tadeusz first. There were still foreign diplomats based in the city, several of whom she knew personally, and as she began doing the rounds of the embassies in Millionnaya Street she was, initially, hopeful of success. However, all those men who had once been so gallant and eager now had nothing to offer. Their own situation was uncertain, given that Lenin had not guaranteed to honour Russia’s former diplomatic allegiances; and there was only one, the Swedish consul, who didn’t turn her away.

He had been a guest at her wedding the previous year, so Tamara had expected a sympathetic hearing at the very least. His treatment of her, however, turned out to be humiliating, even sadistic. The consul was eating his dinner when she was shown in to see him, a rich succulent meal, which indicated that some people at least were protected from the city’s food shortages. Half starved herself, the meaty aromas in the room made Tamara nauseous, yet the consul ignored her distress and implacably told her to sit and eat with him so that he could hear the details of her case. Just as implacably, he made it clear that if he became involved, he would expect certain sexual favours in return.

When Tamara told this story she claimed that as soon as she left the embassy she had vomited violently in the street: a reaction to the consul’s food as well as to the offensive terms of his offer. Yet wretched as she was, the consul had convinced her to trust him, and grimly she accepted his help. He’d been able to reassure her that Tadeusz was almost certainly still alive. Lenin was trying to curtail the bloodletting, and as yet very few death sentences had been passed. He stood a good chance of securing Tadeusz’s release, too, as long as nothing more serious could be proved against him than running with the wrong crowd. But the consul also persuaded Tamara of the danger she was in, and of the little she could do to help Tadeusz by remaining in the city. He offered to organize a forged Swedish passport, advised her to pack just a few of her most valuable possessions, and promised to travel with her on the slow train to the border with Finland and the West.

Tamara would later recall that journey through a sequence of searing images. The hammer and sickle that was newly emblazoned on the train, in place of the Tsar’s insignia. The heavy tread of the Red Army soldiers as they walked through the carriage to check everybody’s papers. Her own dizzy stumble as she walked across the narrow footbridge that took her into the safety of Finland. The night she spent with the consul in the border hotel, as the final instalment of her payment.

What was done was done, however, and by the time Tamara had journeyed by boat to Copenhagen to be reunited with her family, she was almost ready to boast of her courage and her adventures. Thanks to her uncle’s prudence the whole family were installed in a pleasant hotel, and Tamara could feel her old optimism stirring as she waited for news of Tadeusz and the political developments in Russia.

The Stifters still assumed, as did most of the other refugees in Copenhagen, that the revolution would be short lived. In response to Lenin’s tactical withdrawal from the war, the Allies had begun an invasion across Russian borders, which was expected to restore the Tsar. Yet in the months that followed, the Bolshevik’s own control of Russia spread and reluctantly Maurice Stifter was forced to make alternative plans. Settling in Warsaw, the family’s other home, was no longer an option given how politically fraught that city had also become.
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Although they spent a short time there, during which they were finally joined by Tadeusz, Maurice judged that they would only be safe if they travelled as far as Paris. In the spring of 1918 he arranged for the family to make the 850-mile journey in separate groups, in order to minimize the attention they might attract (as Poles with Russian residency both their national status and their war affiliations were in doubt). By early summer, they had all arrived safely, but it was then that news came through of the Tsar’s assassination. The family’s exile now seemed to be permanent.

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Tamara may have exaggerated her heroism in the retelling of her wartime adventures, but she had discovered a new and resilient independence in herself, and a less deferential attitude towards her husband. Even in Copenhagen, where she had been genuinely anxious for Tadeusz’s safety, she had grown tired with the long wait, and been happy to distract herself with another man. By a seemingly odd coincidence, the consul from the Siamese embassy in Petrograd had appeared at the Stifters’ hotel. He, too, had been a guest at Tamara’s wedding, but in contrast to his Swedish colleague, the consul’s physical attentions were very welcome to her. Tamara willingly entered into a brief affair with him – relishing his elegance and his worldly company she even accompanied him on a short diplomatic mission to London and Paris.

Tamara had a very clear sense of what was owing to her – it had been bred into her since she was a child – and given the traumas of her recent ordeal, she felt she deserved nothing less than the comforts this pleasing man could offer. She didn’t even feel much remorse when Tadeusz finally arrived in Warsaw, haggard from weeks in prison. She was relieved that he had escaped, of course, and was ready to devote herself to being his wife, but the man who’d come back to her was not the husband she had known. Incarceration had broken his spirit and all he could talk about was his own humiliation and pain, showing irksomely little interest in anything his wife might have suffered.

It was a mystery to Tamara how her confident playboy of a husband could become so unattractively mired in depression. She missed the man she had married, and, because she had so little talent for empathy, his self-pity struck her as unworthy. She began to develop a germ of contempt for him and, even in Paris, where she too began to experience depression, she felt no twinge of sympathetic recognition for his suffering. It was one reason why, when Tamara found the resolve to turn her life around, she did so entirely on her own terms and without bothering to consult Tadeusz. Once she had decided to become a professional painter she immersed herself completely in the project, certain that from now on her own ambitions would take precedence over his.

Such ruthless focus would of course prove very useful to Tamara over the next few years as she forged ahead with her career. But she was also fortunate to be situated in Paris, where the art world was comparatively sympathetic to women of ambition like herself. Even though most of the French academies had only recently opened their doors to mixed students, and many female painters depended on the mentoring and support of men
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, there were a significant number who had achieved highly visible success. Among them were Suzanne Valadon, who became the first woman elected to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1894; and the Fauvist Emilie Charmy – of whom it was always said that she looked like a woman but painted like a man.

These were powerful role models, and they attracted many other women to Paris. Nina Hamnett studied there in 1914, and returned regularly: Gwen John, the reclusive, gifted sister of Augustus John (and mistress to Rodin) was achieving belated recognition in the city’s salons. Jean Rhys, who herself came to Paris to write in the early Twenties, observed that Paris seemed to be ‘full of girls’ who talked of nothing but becoming painters. For Tamara, the number of aspiring women in Paris was both an encouragement and competition – and she responded well to competition.

By the end of 1919 she had enrolled herself in the Académie Ransom, a private school run by the widow of the Fauvist painter Paul Ransom. Passing Kizette over to the care of her mother, who was living in a pension close by, Tamara devoted most of her day to her new vocation. When classes were finished she went to the Louvre, filling the pages of her sketchbook with notes and copies of the works in its collection. At home she continued to sketch, ignoring the ache in her back and the strain in her eyes. Just as her thirteen-year-old self had worked obsessively at Adrienne’s portrait, she was now relentless in her determination to improve her draughtsmanship, smoking three packets of cigarettes a day to keep her brain alert, and then sedating herself with large doses of valerian.

Less than a year after she entered the Académie, Tamara judged that the first stage of her education was complete. Her teachers had nothing more to show her; she could feel the confident, hard pulse of her ambition, and was ready to forge her own style. The avant-garde works that she saw displayed in Left Bank galleries were of little interest to her: the muddy earth tones used by followers of Cézanne, the abstract introspection of Kandinsky, the crazy nihilism of the Dadaists, were all equally offensive, as she later wrote, ‘I was disgusted with the banality into which art had fallen.’ Most of these artists seemed, to her frankly inept, unable even to draw; and much as she reluctantly admired Picasso’s success, she believed it was simply because his art ‘embodied the novelty of destruction’. By contrast, her own models were to be the Renaissance masters she had first discovered with Clementine: ‘I aimed at technique, métier, simplicity and good taste … colours light and bright.’
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Yet reactionary as Tamara’s artistic instincts were, she would be drawn, magpie like, to the bolder, more dynamic aspects of modernism. She developed a colour palette of almost unnatural lacquered brilliance; the figures in her paintings had a physical force suggestive of Leger, or of Picasso’s monumental nudes. Most influential on her early work was the implosive energy and fractured shapes of cubism, whose style she principally absorbed through the work of André Lhote.

She studied privately with the painter for several months, drawn to the way he applied cubism to decorative and modish subject matter. Lhote painted attractive people framed within fragments of a stylish bar or nightclub scene; female nudes arousingly displayed.
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And if many of his peers disdained his work as ‘soft’, or ‘salon’ cubism, he provided Tamara with a model she could both copy and transcend. Portraiture was to be her principle genre, portraits of beautiful, charismatic or powerful people. And her instinct for what was chic, combined with her mastery of classical techniques, created a style that chimed deeply with contemporary commercial taste. In 1922, after less than two years of study, she had a trio of works accepted for the Salon d’Automne, one of the most widely attended showcases for new art in Paris.

Her entries had been sponsored by friends on the selection committee: Maurice Denis, one of her teachers at the Academy, and her sister Adrienne who, impressively, was already acquiring a reputation as an architect. Even so, Tamara saw her inclusion in the Salon as a pure vindication of her talent. It was the first milestone on her journey towards money and fame, and she marked it with the promise that she would buy herself a new diamond bracelet with every two paintings that she sold, and that she would continue buying them until she had diamonds stacked from wrist to elbow.

Tamara’s application to her new vocation initially had a positive effect on Tadeusz, who in 1920 accepted a lawyer’s position with the Banque de Commerce. The salary wasn’t large, but it restored a little of his self-esteem, and it was sufficient both to engage a housekeeper to help with Kizette and to rent a decent-sized apartment. Tamara had fallen in love with a flat that had a spacious north-facing sitting room, able to double as a painter’s studio. The fact that it was already occupied by the father of the concierge was no obstacle: the concierge was no match for her bullying, wheedling campaign and declared bluntly to Tadeusz: ‘
Votre femme elle m’a eut jusque’au trognon
’ (your wife sucks the marrow out of my bones).
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The father was relocated.

The flat was on the Right Bank, but Tamara made almost daily journeys across the river to Montparnasse. This working-class area, a still-traditional mix of local grocery stores and cheap bars, was fast becoming the new artistic centre of Paris. And while she personally felt detached from many of the new trends, Tamara took care to keep abreast of them. She studied the works that were showing in the art galleries opening near the Seine and the Jardin du Luxembourg. More closely still, she studied the artists who gathered in Left Bank cafés like the Dome or the Rotonde, or in the bookshops run by Adrienne Monnier and her lover Sylvia Beach. Monnier’s La Maison des Amis des Livres, and Beach’s Shakespeare and Company were not only the places in which the latest art books and poetry could be found, but also the latest gossip.

Tamara knew she had to find a way into this Left Bank community. Life in St Petersburg had taught her the importance of making social contacts, of knowing how insiders dressed, talked and conducted themselves. She had already begun meeting Adrienne and her friends at Les Deux Magots; but as she made the rounds of other cafés she was often happy to sit alone, wanting simply to listen and watch.

Some of what she saw was confusing. Among the students and artists seated around her were socialists and anarchists, parroting views that Tamara thought she had left behind in Russia. They were hideously dressed: the men in cheap suits or workers’ overalls; the women in coarsely woven smocks and headscarves. Tamara couldn’t understand why anyone would pretend to be a peasant. Her brief exposure to the Bolshevik terror had hardened her hatred of anything left wing or revolutionary. As she sat in the corner by herself, drinking her afternoon coffee, she felt that she had little point of contact with these strident young people.