The last mystery about Tamara de Lempicka falls - Art

(by Elisabetta Stefanelli)

''After 30 years of studies, 6 catalogues, 7 exhibitions, a book, two or three prefaces, every time you find something new!''.

, the painter with a very personal style and bright colors who spanned a century, never ceases to surprise her major Italian scholar

, who

reveals that she had just discovered ''that she had falsified his date of birth, which completely shifts the axis of his life''.

At this point, adds the scholar, ''I am ready to write her final biography and put back in order all the pieces found in these thirty years of work on her, which had always narrated her life to say the least. imaginative ''.

All this while Mori works on the first major exhibition dedicated to Tamara de Lempicka in the United States, the country where she disappeared in 1980 after her Polish mother, Russian father and Latvian grandmother had lived and crossed all of Europe before moving and dying In the USA.

She will be

, and she is curating it together with Furio Rinaldi.

And it was there that she discovered the trace of that document that changed the history of the famous painter.''Right from the start, in 1990, when I started studying her, I understood that what she had told and what her daughter had reported in the biography was everything a little questionable.

But Tamara was famous for emphasizing the episodes she had experienced.

She always liked to say that she was in history with a capital H, even when it wasn't true, and maybe if it was necessary to move some date she would do it without any problems.

So, for example, she had always placed her arrival in America on the day of the Wall Street crash of '29, in reality, sifting through the Ellis Island documents, we discover that she had arrived on April 3rd with a 60-day permit, so that Fateful October 29th she must have already left some time ago.

But you know, I was born as an art historian specializing in the Venetian Renaissance, so by training I'm used to verifying sources.

From the beginning I dismantled her lies piece by piece, but the mystery remained about the place and date of her birth ''.

.

''The publications when she was alive said that she was born in 1900 or 1902, but then it was always said that she was older than her sister Adriana born in 1899, consequently she must have been born at least in 1898...but she had never known with certainty''. Now the art historian is preparing ''a very important exhibition for the Museum of Fine Arts in San Francisco,

: around a hundred works including paintings (70- 80) and drawings.

It is the first exhibition in the United States after the catastrophic one in 1941. At the moment Tamara de Lempicka

, there is the centenary of Art Deco, there is a musical that will be staged in March on her.

But up until now she has always been considered more of a character than an artist''.

Even while working on the exhibition he made progress: ''I discovered this trace, yes, because in 1929 he arrived in New York, then left on the train to Santa Fe, finally to San Francisco, where he sold a painting to a gentleman who shortly after ends up at auction.

A journey about which almost nothing was known."

It is while she is working on these materials that Gioia Mori is contacted by an American entertainment producer who has made a documentary.

She showed me two sheets found by a Polish archivist which document the conversions of three children from the Jewish religion to the Orthodox one, and one of the three is Tamara.

She hands me these sheets somewhat anonymously, they are forms with parts printed in German, parts handwritten in Cyrillic: I go to my Russian philologist and he is Russian.

She translates for me the three sections that talk about Stanislao, Tamara Rosa and Adriana, the three little brothers.

They are their three certificates of conversion from Jewish to Orthodox faith, in 1897. They were all born before: she was six years away on 16 June 1894.

She was gorgeous, wonderful!

Those of his brother and sister are also wrong: he was born in '94 and his sister in '95, a completely different thing.

''

, for example the first exhibition in 1922 she was 28 years old she wasn't really a child as she wanted us to believe, the first monographic she was 31. She couldn't have thought that we would have digitized everything and discovered all her affairs her.

It is a highly destabilizing fact for those who love her, and many of them have even done a Google search for her date of birth''.

So now the exhibition will be ''exactly 130 years after her birth''.

The character Tamara de Lempicka at this point becomes even more multifaceted.

Furthermore, she certifies the conversion, another obscure point.

Why change her date of birth?

''Firstly out of pure vanity, it was done at the time.

Then for symbolic reasons, I thought.

because it is the year of the revolution.

Then I thought that she wanted to be the modern woman of the new century, she didn't want to be born in the nineteenth century.

But also because she loved to lie.

When she arrives in Paris she says that her brother had died, but it wasn't true but he was a communist and had remained in communist Poland, which she didn't want to accept.

It was like this''.

In short, many years spent by Gioia Mori with Tamara: ''it was worth it.

Thanks to her I met some wonderful people: the gallery owner, her latest boyfriend, some collectors who are close to her heart, incredible people like Jack Nicholson, a very refined man with whom I write.

Many from entertainment and fashion whose names I cannot name.

Madonna?

No, not her.

I wrote to her many times to borrow her paintings, I thought it was a duty to share them with the rest of the world, but instead she always replied that to see them you have to buy them.

A painting worth 20 million?''.

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