It is a pity so many biographers of women feel obliged to represent their subjects as though they were the heroines of bad romantic fiction. Laura Claridge's subtitle immediately suggests this problem will occur here; there is something so self-consciously artificial about the word decadence, which now comes replete with archaic "greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery" connotations. The same air of calculated artifice hangs over the entire book, in which the author manoeuvres her material to suit a specific image of Tamara de Lempicka.
The artist was by no means immune to creating her own highly calculated self-image. Of Polish parentage, she was born and raised between Moscow and St Petersburg, fleeing the latter in the midst of the Russian Revolution. Like many other emigres, she soon settled in Paris and made a new life for herself there as a painter. The very obvious necessity for reinvention which violent upheaval must inspire is largely ignored by her biographer, even while she tortuously endeavours to disentangle de Lempicka's reality from her fantasy. Laura Claridge has discovered a lot more than anyone else about this indisputably remarkable woman, but she then smothers her revelations in a mess of over-coloured prose. So, for example, she writes of Paris that "Orgies among artists were, it is true, a legend of early Modernism." Is this true? The French capital during the 1920s here becomes a heaving mass of overt sexuality and hedonism, which may possibly have been intermittently the case for a small number of residents but hardly the norm Claridge implies. And yet, rather oddly, when writing of Tamara de Lempicka in Italy, that country becomes a centre of sexual liberation in place of Paris where, she now claims "propriety was demanded by much of upper-class society."
The confusion extends to de Lempicka's own social standing; in the space of a single paragraph, she is assigned to both the aforementioned "upper-class" and to the bourgeoisie; since her parentage was Jewish and her father was either a merchant or banker, the artist's original place in the social hierarchy is quite clear. The muddle continues whenever she decides to subject Tamara de Lempicka's work to scrutiny. Claridge is unabashedly a fan, which is perfectly understandable, but is also prone to make excessive claims for the painter particularly when she tries to find a place for her in the the canon of art history. Among the more extraordinary statements she makes is that de Lempicka "lost her opportunity to secure a reputation as an artist of the first rank when she rejected Paris's Left Bank art world in favour of its well-heeled society set," as if her cultural status was defined simply on the basis of the people with whom she ate dinner.
Even more unwisely, she frequently relies on de Lempicka's own assessment of work, as when the artist claimed "I paint someone as they (sic) really are, but inside too, not only their outside. I have to use my intuition and all the talent I have to capture the real person." Nothing could be less true of this painter, whose portraits in particular present an impeccable - and impenetrable - surface. De Lempicka was the heir to an earlier generation of artists such as Philip de Lazlo and Giovanni Boldini who represented their subjects as they wished to be seen. In her own age, the most obvious comparison to be made is with another woman artist in France, Marie Laurencin who, although working in a totally different style, also produced beautiful but vacuous art.
Towards the end of her life - when she had taken to producing updated copies of the works which had first made her reputation - de Lempicka greatly resented any suggestion that she belonged to a now-vanished world. Claridge is equally indignant on her behalf but on this, as on so much else, the author has become seduced by the same romantic notions as her subject.
Robert O' Byrne is an Irish Times journalist