Arty-Farty Friday ~ Tamara de Lempicka

Tamara de Lempicka was an artist and celebrity of the Art Deco era, the 1920s and 30s, well-known for her wild and decadent lifestyle. Reviewing a biography of Lempicka by Laura Claridge "A Life of Deco and Decadence" writer Glyn Vincent reveals that

"In the Paris salon of the poet Natalie Barney, she sniffed cocaine and drank sloe gin fizzes laced with hashish among the likes of Andre Gide. On the banks of the Seine, she picked up sailors and female prostitutes.
After her nocturnal debauches, she painted until dawn. Her life style (and her "affair" with the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio) sent her first husband, Tadeusz Lempicki, packing into the arms of a plump heiress."
And

"Lempicka's success allowed her to mingle with avant-gardists like Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali and Filippo Marinetti, but she remained disengaged from the progressive, leftist artistic climate of her time. Aloof and wild, she was fundamentally anti-intellectual. At home, too, she remained at sea. An absent wife, she used her artistic life to excuse her infidelities. A rigid perfectionist, she abused her daughter, Kizette.
After her first marriage fell apart she suffered from
severe bouts of depression that were to plague her for the rest of her life."

She is quoted as saying: "I live life in the margins of society, and the rules of normal society don't apply to those who live on the fringe."


Tamara de Lempicka was born into a wealthy Polish family, married a Russian lawyer after moving to live with an aunt in Russia. The couple fled from the Bolsheviks to Paris where her reputation as a sought-after portrait painter was established.
She had beauty and poise, described as rather aloof and Garbo-esque, but gathered a colorful reputation on the French social scene after several love affairs - with both sexes. When World War 2 seemed inevitable she moved to the USA with her second husband, a wealthy baron. Her popularity declined slowly after the war, before enjoying a renaissance in the 1970s.


As an artist Lempicka flirted with cubism and eventually settled on her own version of it, which some sources have called "soft cubism". She was, in the main, a
portrait painter, to the rich and famous. Her highly stylized portraits are immediately recognisable as hers - though whether they resemble the sitters, I can't say.



Astrology here is tricky, for it's said that the lady frequently lied about her age as well as her place of birth, for reasons of vanity or safety, perhaps both at different times. She was born in either Warsaw or Moscow on 16 May (the day and month seem fixed) in either 1898 (as she preferred it known) or 1896 or even 1895. I'll take Warsaw as her place of birth, as her parents were from well to do Polish families. She went to live with her aunt in Russia sometime in late childhood.

Natal Sun was at 25 degrees of Taurus whatever the year of birth, so is conjunct Fixed Star Algol, the star with the most malefic reputation of all. When researching for a piece about Algol I found that modern astrologers have sought to attach a less drastic meaning to this Fixed Star. Some connect it to energies of "the feminine" (presumably a link to Medusa's powers), others prefer a much diluted version of the traditional interpretation. The latter group surmises that anyone with Algol conjunct natal Sun or other personal planet is likely to be intense, perhaps prone to violence if provoked, and passionate in all enterprises (similar to Scorpio traits).
(See my post here) .

Pluto and Neptune remained in Gemini in 1895 to 1898, but the personal planet close to them in Lempicka's chart changes : Mercury in 1895 or 1896 ; Venus, between the two outer planets in 1898. That's not sufficient to be able to pinpoint which year is most likely her true birth year.

In the 1895 chart there's a Cancer stellium including Venus/Jupiter/Mars which doesn't fit her personality as described in her biography. She seems to have been a less than Cancerian motherly mother, and a less than sensitive character all round, with no hint of Cancerian shyness. The 1896 chart though has Moon in Cancer, so the sign is difficult to discount. Perhaps her reputation for aloofness links to Cancer.

In the 1896 chart Venus was in Taurus, with the Sun, Taurus is ruled by Venus planet of the arts, which is appropriate for her. The 1898 chart is reasonable too, but if she was inclined to lie about her age, as is suggested, then the 1896 would be the better bet.

It's a mystery, and a pity that her birth data is so unclear. She'd have been a fascinating character to investigate. The only definite factor I can pull out of what's available is the Sun/Algol conjunction, which is interesting in itself.

Self-portrait



More detail on Tamara de Limpicka at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamara_de_Lempicka
http://www.answers.com/topic/tamara-de-lempicka
http://www.paloma.ca/gallery.html