Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (15 page)

But still she liked to be among them, imagining herself as a compelling, mysterious presence, gracefully shrouded in her own cigarette smoke, apparently deep in thought. She registered the faces of those who seemed to hold most sway over a room. And she kept her antennae tuned to the other people in the cafés, fashionable men and women who were clearly tourists in this world and who might one day be patrons of her own work.

In the early Twenties, Paris was once again a marketplace of modern culture. Before 1914 it had been the capital of the Belle Époque, home to the symbolists, decadents, post-impressionists, cubists and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Now it was the city of black jazz, Dada, and the emerging surrealists, avant-garde ballet and international poetry magazines. As the American stock market boomed and European economies regained their post-war momentum, art became a very desirable commodity. It was chic, it conferred status and it was a sound investment. Prices for a known artist like Picasso were rising – the most commercial of his paintings fetching up to a hundred thousand francs – and among foreign buyers there was already brisk competition to find the next significant talent. The entire oeuvre of a likely painter might be bought up by a single collector, and a new, avid breed of art tourists paid for guided tours of studios, or even visits to cafés and bars where fashionable painters might be spotted at play.

The nightclub singer Bricktop recalled that in the mid-1920s this symbiosis between money and culture seemed ‘a beautiful, beautiful thing’. Paris was full of impoverished artists ‘who wanted to write, who wanted to paint and perform’; it was equally ‘full of people who had money but couldn’t make it’ and it was these ‘rich ones’ who began ‘taking care of the … geniuses’.
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The commercial opportunities in Paris were all very interesting to Tamara, who saw nothing romantic in the idea of being poor or misunderstood. Financial success couldn’t come quickly enough for her as an artist, and there may even have been an element of calculation in the work she opted to focus on during her early career. Portraiture was a money-making genre – many of Tamara’s diamond bracelets would be bought with lucrative commissions from society figures. But certain of her canvases were particularly appealing to the 1920s art market – those that had young, contemporary and very desirable women as their subjects.

Tamara worshipped glamour. Having always aspired to it herself, she vowed ‘to scent [it] out’ in her models, and lavished as much care on their appearance as she did on her own – the exact shade of their lipstick and eye shadow, the styling of their hair, the cut of their clothes. Their skin was particularly beautiful: Tamara had perfected a technique of tiny deliberate brush strokes that allowed her to paint surfaces of a peculiarly glossy lustre; the classical luminosity of her models’ skin would frequently be compared to Ingres.

Naked or clothed, the subjects of her portraits also possessed a liberated sexual poise: they looked like women who were accustomed to drinking in cafés or bars, who took lovers yet cherished their independence. Tamara, by instinct as much as by choice, was making herself into the portrait painter of the new woman, the flapper, the
garçonne,
and everything conspired to make this a highly marketable move.

Young women were much in the headlines. Victor Margueritte’s novel
La Garçonne
*
had recently been published, its narrative of lesbianism, drugs and single motherhood causing such a scandal that Margueritte was stripped of his Légion d’honneur. The timing of its publication had been almost as controversial as its subject matter, since it appeared in bookshops on the same day that the French senate voted against giving women the vote.

Members of the French Union for Women’s Suffrage protested vehemently, along with the eighty or so feminist organizations that now operated in France. Yet despite being excluded from official politics, women in France, no less than their British and American peers, were finding other ways to assert their presence: through the jobs they demanded, through the independence they claimed and, almost as significantly, through their clothes.

In the nineteenth century America and Britain had been the principle battleground for the women’s dress reform,
*
but it was in Paris that the battle for emancipation joined forces with couture style. Coco Chanel, the orphaned seamstress who opened her own couture house on rue Cambon, went far beyond Poiret and his generation. She created simple shift dresses, geometric in their lines but swinging easily around a woman’s body as she walked. She appropriated the demotic uniforms of sailors and workers for a new line of bell-bottom trousers and striped jerseys; she replaced large fussy hats with berets, turbans and, by the mid-1920s, closely fitting cloches that were designed to show off their wearer’s short and shingled hair. Chanel’s rival Jean Patou predicated his own most famous styles on sportswear – the 1921 Wimbledon star Suzanne Lenglen wore his clothes both on and off the court.

There was a liberating androgyny in these new styles – the term
garçonne
was precise – and just as significantly a degree of democracy. No Chanel design was cheap to buy, yet some of her garments could be reproduced with economy and speed. The inexpensive materials that she made fashionable – cottons and jerseys (the latter formerly used for men’s underwear) – were perfect for low-budget imitation. She even democratized jewellery, creating a vogue for ‘illusion’ pieces that were constructed out of paste and gilt.

Tamara considered fashion her natural element. She had her hair cut short in 1922, so that it curved sleekly to her head, dramatizing her broad Slavic cheekbones and the brilliant blue of her eyes. Clothes were harder for her: she was still large-boned, lushly curved and too vain to force herself into straightcut shifts or trousers. Instead she played with more theatrical outfits, favouring draped white satin and feather trims for evening wear, and of course her diamond bracelets. Her interest in clothes was meticulously transferred to her canvases. In the double portrait
Irene and her Sister
(1925), the architectural folds of Irene’s silver-grey dress contrasted with her sister’s extravagant fall of golden hair and green coat. These elegantly dressed women, posed ambiguously against a dark forest background, were not merely a painterly construct, they looked like an illustration for a fashion magazine.

Tamara portrayed women as she imagined they liked to view themselves, as both chic and sexually desirable. But even more distinctive was the fact that her models’ allure was directed as much, if not more, towards the gaze of other women as it was to men. Around 1920 Tamara became acquainted with one of her neighbours, a woman whom she would later casually refer to as ‘a very wealthy girl across the street, a red head who sat for many paintings’.
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Her name was Ira Perrot, and she was the model for one of Tamara’s most successful early portraits,
Portrait of a Young Lady in a Blue Dress.
In this 1922 work the woman’s solidly fleshed body is clearly naked beneath the cobalt blue draping of her dress, and the gaze from her kohl-darkened eyes is half accusing, half complicit. The portrait has a candid eroticism rarely seen in Tamara’s earlier work and it also had a very personal resonance, for Ira was almost certainly the woman with whom she had her first lesbian affair.

Tamara liked sex, and when the opportunity allowed she had already begun to take lovers in Paris. Tadeusz’s shattered nerves and the claustrophobia of their early lodgings had made her nostalgic for the adulterous adventures she’d enjoyed with her Siamese consul. She trawled the cafés for attractive men and, as she later boasted, found it took very little to signal her availability. A slight, feline arching of her back and a glance slid from under her long eyelids would be followed by a drink and a few pleasantries. Tamara didn’t waste much time in making it clear that she was happy to accompany her new conquest to his hotel room or apartment.

But it was only after she met Ira Perrot that Tamara began to appreciate the possibilities of women. Initially, she and Ira were probably just friends,
*
but in 1921 they went on holiday to Italy, which, for Tamara, remained one of the most passionate experiences of her life. To return to the cities she had explored with her grandmother, to enjoy the luxury of first-class hotels (at Ira’s expense) felt like a precious return to her former privileged life. In the arms of her new lover, she experienced them all with a fresh pleasure.

It never seems to have occurred to her to react against these new feelings, to wonder if they were a momentary aberration. Even though the affair with Ira eventually waned, Tamara’s interest in women didn’t, and her work became redolent of it.
Perspective,
painted in 1923, was one of the most technically impressive canvases of her early career. Its portrayal of two embracing women combines a classical finish with a modernist dynamic – the women’s naked flesh looking sumptuously golden against a turquoise cloth, the line of their bodies distorted to create an exaggerated effect of mass. But it is the physical intimacy of their embrace that dominates the picture, with one of the women abstractedly stroking the inner thigh of the other as they lie together, her head thrown back in an ecstatic drowse. The scene is one of unmistakable post-coital languor, suggesting that Tamara herself could had been making love to these women before retreating to her easel to paint them. At the very least it looks as if she was painting from experience, and as critics began to identify her as a painter of ‘Amazons’
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Tamara encouraged that perception by gaining the friendship and patronage of a prominent circle of sapphists.

Women with money and influence played a significant role in the cultural life of Paris. As hostesses of their own private salons, they made it their responsibility to nurture careers, and broker contacts and connections. Three of the most powerful were Natalie Barney, Gertrude Stein and the Princesse de Polignac (who before her marriage had been Winnaretta Singer, daughter of the sewing-machine magnate). All were American expatriates and lesbians, and for Tamara to gain entrée into at least one of their salons was to assure herself of valuable support.

Her first attempt had been discouraging. A friend had taken Tamara to one of Gertrude Stein’s Saturday salons, held in Stein’s apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus. Stein herself had been a disappointment – plump and plain in her brown corduroy smock, her hair unbecomingly arranged in a cottage loaf of a bun – and while Tamara could acknowledge that this odd-looking American had an impressive art collection on her walls (Stein had discovered Picasso long before most buyers) she found the style of entertainment at rue de Fleurus impossible. It was bad enough that Stein presided over conversation that was both pretentious and dry (to Tamara’s ears), but insultingly, she was allowed only a few minutes with Stein and her favoured guests before being dispatched into a corner to sit with Alice B. Toklas – Stein’s ‘wife’ – to eat cakes and drink tea. Tamara could acknowledge the excellence of Miss Toklas’s baking, but where, she wondered, was the champagne?

Stein had made it ruthlessly clear that she rated neither Tamara nor her painting. Later, when she was more closely infiltrated into Left Bank society, Tamara realized that Stein, on the whole, was far less professionally welcoming to women than she was to men. However, when she went to Natalie Barney’s salon, Tamara encountered a completely different world, one that embraced and supported women with magnificent largesse, whether in their private affairs or in their public careers.
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Barney had embraced her lesbianism with peculiar self-confidence. Born in 1876, she said that from the age of twelve she had claimed ‘the perilous advantage’ of ‘being other than normal’.
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Once she had become independently wealthy, thanks to money inherited from her father, she had left her home city of Washington to settle in Paris, where she set out to create a sapphic idyll.

She was not a proselytizer for the lesbian cause. The theories advanced by Havelock Ellis concerning the natural fluidity of sexuality made little impression on her; she required neither permission nor explanation for her own desires – and while she was interested to see a younger generation living with new sexual freedom, personally she shrank from making too assertive a display of her tastes. ‘I am lesbian,’ she said, ‘one need not hide it nor boast of it.’
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She certainly disapproved of those who took the extreme route of cropping their hair aggressively short and wearing monocles, waistcoats and trousers.

Barney herself appeared intensely feminine, dressing in the pre-Raphaelite style that was favoured by the Duchess of Rutland and writing reams of mistily rapturous love poetry.
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Yet even the most masculine sapphist of the period would have found it hard to equal her predatory boldness in matters of sex. She divided her affairs into three categories, starting with the longterm ‘liaisons’ that she had with a very few select lovers, most enduringly the painter Romaine Brooks and the writer Élisabeth de Gramont, who became known as the Red Duchess for her violently socialist views. Then came the ‘demi-liaisons’, which included Barney’s affair with the writer Colette, and finally the ‘adventures’, the numerous casual encounters she enjoyed with women who, according to Alice B. Toklas, she frequently picked up in the toilets of department stores.

Those encounters had to be managed with discretion. Paris was famed for a degree of sexual tolerance – Oscar Wilde had begged his lover Alfred Douglas to flee there after their affair became public – and it was rich in transgressive haunts, from cross-dressing bars to homosexual cabarets. But in most public areas, it was impossible for two women, or two men, to openly solicit each other or behave like lovers without attracting abuse. Among the more strait-laced circles of the Parisian upper classes, a known lesbian would certainly not be accepted, which was why Natalie had to create her own private world of entertainment, from within her elegant two-storey
pavillon
on the edge of the Latin Quarter in Montparnasse.