Free Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation by Judith Mackrell Page A

proceedings. And with Tadeusz definitely out of her life, Tamara focused more attention on her daughter – at least on canvas. She was now painting Kizette more frequently, and for her part Kizette was an apparently compliant model, grateful to spend more time with her mother, anxious to please as she attempted to pose motionless during each forty-five minute session. They are uncomfortable paintings, though – one in particular, which shows Kizette sitting on the balcony of their apartment, suggests an unacknowledged but powerful resistance in her relationship with Tamara. While Kizette’s hand is placed quietly in her lap, her blue gaze is staring half sullenly, half challengingly at the unseen woman painting her. The art world judged it to be a powerful painting, winning Tamara first place at the 1927 Exposition Internationale des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, but it was not a happy one.
    Certainly as far as Kizette was concerned, Cherie was reverting hurtfully to her old patterns. ‘She stayed out late and came home with so much energy she would paint for twelve hours non-stop. Then she’d take her favourite medicine, valerian, so she could get some sleep.’ 17 Tamara was painting to exorcise Tadeusz, but she was also galvanized by the discovery of a new model. Sometime in 1927 she had been walking in the Bois de Boulogne when she had noticed a curious activity in the crowd ahead of her. People were pausing or breaking stride, turning their heads, and the reason was a young woman heading in her direction. It was one of those moments, she later recalled, when her perceptions were heightened and she felt the pulse of her vocation quicken.
    The woman was astoundingly beautiful and when Tamara peremptorily begged to paint her, she was more than happy to comply. Rafaela turned out to be a professional, working as a model and part-time prostitute, but while that made her a very familiar type, she had a physical ripeness, a glossiness of colouring, that Tamara had never seen. She would have taken Rafaela to bed if she hadn’t wanted to use her as a model so badly, and the quality of the three portraits she went on to paint may well have been charged with the intensity of deflected desire. In La Belle Rafaela, the softly lit curves of the young woman’s body, foreshortened and exaggerated, have a perfumed heaviness, a bruised and satiated quality. In The Dream, or Rafaela with Green Background, a rare moment of intimacy is caught on canvas: Tamara has used unusually soft skin tones, making Rafaela’s flesh look vulnerable, and captured an equally vulnerable expression in the model’s eyes, an expression of darkness clearing, as if she has just awoken.
    Professionally and socially Tamara was now working towards the peak of her success. British art critics were joining the European interest in her work, with the Sunday Times comparing her favourably to Wyndham Lewis, and the magazine Graphic publishing a flattering reproduction and review of La Belle Rafaela. In 1928 she was commissioned to paint a series of cover images for Die Dame, the German fashion magazine, which was one of the most significant commissions of her career. Not only did it bring her exposure to a mass market (and a lot of money), but one of the images she produced for the magazine, AutoPortrait or Tamara in the Green Bugatti, became her most widely reproduced painting. It showed a woman driver, gloved and helmeted for speed, her blonde hair and long, heavy-lidded eyes quite recognizable as Tamara.
    She had painted herself as an icon of the decade, and as her stock rose on the social register, Tamara’s life moved closer to the perfection she created on canvas. She had honed her appearance to a sleek, expensive look: her short blonde hair was styled in marcelled waves, and her scarlet lipstick and nail varnish were balanced by thick false eyelashes. She wore evening gowns by Poiret and the young Schiaparelli, whose artful folding and draping flattered her