Three Muses of Modernism
The Women Who defined an age
“Madame Errázuriz is now a very old woman …we sauntered through rooms furnished with the same stark taste that characterizes Picasso and Gertrude Stein. The floors are polished and bare, furniture is bold … Panelled walls have been painted a French grey. A bunch of tightly packed peonies in a glass goblet on a brass table should have been painted by Monet. The curtains were made of sprigged white muslin. Huge abstract paintings by Picasso hung on the walls … Mme Errazuriz’s lodge-house is small, simple and in no way spectacular. But for those who can recognize such things, the taste is the height of luxury. This woman’s surroundings have reflected the same uncompromising and sophisticated sparseness … that startled fin de siécle eyes and made Picasso realize he had found a kindred spirit.” — Cecil Beaton
Long before French couturier Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel (1883-1971) uttered the immortal words, “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off”, apropos interiors, ground-breaking style-maker and forward-thinking minimalist Eugenia Huici Arguedas de Errázuriz (1860-1951) said, “Throw out and keep throwing out. Elegance means elimination”. Indeed such a cutthroat attitude ushered in a trend for “la pauvreté de luxe”, or luxurious poverty, where at the beginning of the twentieth century, those in the know opted for an ascetic approach to interiors and fashion, an early take on “stealth wealth”, as it were, which, as Shelley Puhak, writing in The Atlantic, explains, was “reserved exclusively for those who could ‘afford’ to look poor by pretending that they simply couldn’t be bothered with fashion. But on closer inspection, there would be some small detail in her seemingly anonymous garment — a certain cut or fabric or label — that acted as a secret handshake.” Born in Bolivia in 1860, into a prominent family of Basque origin, Errázuriz had an extraordinary influence on art, literature, music and interiors, both as muse and patron. She and her husband, José Tomás Errázuriz Urmeneta (1856-1927), painter, diplomat and heir to a silver mining fortune, moved to Paris in 1882, where, like a bolt of lightning, they changed the taste of a generation, ushering in a simpler, more refined way of living. At a time when silk-swagged, tassel-trimmed Belle Époque interiors had come to define fin de siècle France, Errázuriz, by contrast, went by the maxim, “Pas de bibelots”, or “no knick-knacks”. Indeed her attitude to interiors was, at the time, radical, and in 1918, Polish-American Pianist Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982) described with awe, and certainly more than a hint of shock, his first visit to her apartment on Avenue Montaigne: “The drawing room had nothing but two pictures by Picasso, a portrait of her daughter and a wonderful landscape. She showed me with pride her chairs. ‘Ah! Ah!’ She said, ‘Beautiful chairs. These are the chairs one hires in the Bois De Boulogne and I was lucky to be able to buy them.’”
These simple, wrought iron garden chairs, stolen from the aforementioned public park by poet and playwright Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), and sold to Errázuriz, would, from thereon in, be reinterpreted by myriad leading designers of the age, including the Giacometti brothers, Diego (1902-1985) and Alberto (1901-1966), Gilbert Poillerat (1902-1988), René Prou (1887-1947), Marc Du Planter (1901-1975) and René Drouet (1899-1993). Such was her extraordinary influence, that with the inclusion of such utilitarian, everyday “found” objects in her Parisian apartment, she singlehandedly launched the vogue for integrating iron garden furniture into the interiors of the haute bourgeoisie, a trend still practised today by the likes of Jacques Grange (b. 1944), Stephen Sills (b. 1951) and Peter Marino (b. 1949). “In Paris Eugenia’s apartment was furnished with things that would harmonize with the cubist masterpieces on her walls,” explained art historian John Richardson (1938-2007) in his seminal biography A Life of Picasso. “A stepladder from a hardware store … and a massive red lacquer cupboard [inspired by an old Chinese piece] for the concealment rather than the display of her ‘things’. The self-denial, even mortification, in Eugenia’s minimalism reflected her resolutely austere taste in art and decoration, as well as her Spanish piety.” Yet despite her stripped-back aesthetic, Errázuriz maintained a feeling of luxurious refinement through her assiduously exacting choices, in terms of each and every item that surrounded her; she had the best upholsters in Paris, Chez Leitz, meticulously make white slip-covers for her salon, and her dining table, though always set informally, had napkins of the finest linen, and a service of eighteenth-century French silver flatware. Her minimalist inclinations can, in part, be attributed to her deep Catholic devotion; a religious education at an English convent school in Valparaiso shaped her taste for sobriety and belief that an excess of objects served no purpose, ergo, were indulgent, and therefore, sinful. Errázuriz saw the carefully chosen works peppering her homes as portals to a deeper spirituality, the overall effect being such, that her great-niece, Parisian socialite Patricia López-Willshaw, described her interiors as having “the peace of a convent”. French writer Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was so captivated by her character, an extraordinary mixture of piety and extravagance, that he made the following reference to Errázuriz in Le Temps retrouvé (Time Regained) (1927): “And, like those illustrious ladies in the eighteenth century who became religious, they lived in flats full of cubist paintings, with a cubist painter working only for them and they living only for him.”
“Autoportrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti)” (1928) by Tamara de Lempicka, commissioned for the cover of the German fashion magazine Die Dame, which the artist as “a symbol of women’s liberation”
The refined home of forward-thinking minimalist Eugenia Huici de Errázuriz, where in the salon, typically austere and elegant, Louis XVI furniture, and a pair of comfortable sofas with slipcovers by Chez Leitz
Style maven and beauty magnate Helena Rubinstein (1872-1965) was so enamoured by Errázuriz, as the city’s style arbiter apparent, that in the mid-nineteen twenties, upon finding a home in Montmartre, she immediately sought out her sage advice. “Before starting to do anything to the house I invited Eugenia Errázuriz to look at it and give me some advice,” Rubinstein would later recall. “She looked around approvingly, pointing a finger where the bed had to be: ‘Ah! Ah! red! red! The spread must be red! And the curtains grey! Like the wall! Grey!’” French-Swiss poet, writer and film-maker Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), who called her “L’indienne”, wholeheartedly believed Errázuriz had inherited more than a drop of Inca blood, and whether or not that was the case, her unique sense of colour, inspired by her South American homeland would have a lasting impact on the world of haute couture; as without her, Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) would never have hit upon her signature “shocking pink”, a colour of potent power, adopted by a generation of free-thinking women, from Vogue editor and style icon Diana Vreeland (1903-1989) to Daisy Fellowes (1890-1962), a socialite of international “bad-girl” repute, and actress Zsa Zsa Gabor (1917-2016). Despite its avant-garde outré connotations, it was, in fact, a traditional dye, the pink “Inca” of the Andes, used to treat leather — a sample of which Errázuriz had shown Schiaparelli, with the suggestion she make it her calling card. When in 1918 Picasso went to La Mimoserai, Eugenia’s home in Biarritz, on the occasion of his honeymoon with long-suffering ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova (1891-1955), the ageing lothario was very near overwhelmed by its inherent, effortless elegance, and understated beauty. “To have an expensive ashtray on a table was, for her, as vulgar as putting out a saucer with a large cheque upon it,” recounted photographer Cecil Beaton (1904-1980). “A plain piece of glass was all that was needed.” Rejecting entirely the pomposity of turn-of-the-century style, Errázuriz implemented a decorative scheme of whitewashed walls, bare floors and sparse furnishings, eighty years before ideas of pared-back simplicity became synonymous with fashionable living. “Over the next few years Eugenia would transform La Mimoseraie into a house of monastic simplicity,” Richardson enthused. “A minimalist fifty years ahead of her time, Eugenia had thrown out everything except a few armchairs. Her innovations would shock her hidebound neighbours, who lived in elaborate villas filled with fake dix-huitieme furniture and ormolu bric-á-brac, as much as it delighted her progressive friends.”
Such cultured acquaintances included none other than maître of minimalism Jean-Michel Frank (1895-1941), whom Errázuriz took under her wing, acting as a mentor, and showing him how Louis XVI furniture could be reinterpreted in a way that was relevant to a more relaxed, and less ostentatious way of living. Indeed Frank was so enthralled by her approach, that somewhat uncharacteristically, in an article for for Harper’s Bazaar, he gushed, “Everything I know (more or less) I owe to her. Her influence is indisputable … In a salon of Madame Errázuriz — whether it is her little house in Paris or her villa in Biarritz — the walls are always painted white. The floor is scrubbed with soap and water. There is a comfortable sofa and big armchairs, some pieces of severe Louis XVI with beautiful architectural lines. On the walls always one Picasso or more. At night, a very clear light to accent the neatness … The worth of a belonging has no interest for her. On a valuable table one finds — and how many need to learn this lesson — a simple wicker basket.” Entirely unencumbered by ideas of material wealth, Errázuriz would give her last centime to any hard-up artist, poet or musician, and perhaps unsurprisingly, given her spartan inclinations, toward the end of her life, she would become a lay member of the Franciscan order, on religious occasions, wearing a “habit”, in the form of a simple black shift, designed by none other than Coco Chanel. In her twilight years, Errázuriz returned to Chile, where she planned to build a beach house in the resort town of Viña del Mar, designed by her friend, French architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965). Sadly, her plans never came to fruition, as in 1951, she was struck by a car crossing the road and, the incident taking a severe toll on her health, she declared resolutely, “I am tired of living, I wish to help God to take me out of this life”. Thus, she refused food, destroyed the letters and souvenirs she had accumulated during her life, and passed away peacefully at the age of ninety-one, as she had lived, surrounded by simplicity. Her last words, “I die how I want to die. Everything else is vanity, vanity.” Forgotten after her death, perhaps, to some extent, as she was a patron, as opposed to an artist, Errázuriz inspired the most important artists, writers, musicians, designers and architects of her generation. Beaton wrote after her death: “Her effect on the taste of the last fifty years has been so enormous that the whole aesthetic of modern interior decoration, and many of the concepts of simplicity generally acknowledged today, can be laid at her remarkable doorstep.”
“Les Palmier” (1930-36) smoking room, by Franco-Swiss artist Jean Dunand from the Parisian home of arts patron Colette Aboucaya, with furniture by Katsu Hamanaka
The modernist home of Tamara de Lempicka, 7 rue Méchain, Paris, designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens © 2021 Estate of Robert Mallet-Stevens/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP
Similarly single-minded, Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) arrived in Paris in 1918, a refugee of the Russian Revolution at the dawn of a new era, that saw such rapid advances in art, design and architecture that it must sometimes have seemed hard to catch one’s breath. Consonant with a prevailing desire for “newness”, Lempicka was entirely a product of her age, like a character dreamt up by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), she would enthral and enrapture Parisian society with her devil-may-care antics. Along with her husband, Tadeusz, and daughter Kizette (1916-2021), she abandoned a privileged, decadent life in St Petersburg to start entirely afresh, quite literally selling the family jewels to make ends meet. Indeed their situation was such that her husband, a tall, saturnine attorney of aristocratic lineage, was, on account of their abrupt fall from grace, so overcome with depression he could barely rouse himself from bed, let alone find gainful employment. That being so, with little or no support, Lempicka decided it was time to take drastic action, and by hook or by crook, make a name for herself in the dizzying city of light. “There are no miracles,” she averred. “There is only what you make.” Lempicka had, up until that point been an amateur, self-taught artist, and seeing it as a potential meal ticket, upon the advice of her sister, she took lessons with leading artists of the epoch, including Maurice Denis (1870-1943) at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and later, with André Lhote (1885-1962) at the Académie Ranson. In terms of influence, Lhote, a Fauvist who’d turned to the Synthetic branch of Cubism, seemed to have a far greater impact on her development, as she soon started incorporating the movement’s fractured plains and distortions into her large, figurative compositions. Yet, despite an immediate modernist aesthetic, Lempicka was influenced by a wide variety of sources, including, perhaps surprisingly, the Mannerist painters of the Italian Renaissance, such as Pontormo (1494-1557) and Bronzino (1503-1572), whose work she first encountered as a thirteen-year-old girl on a tour through Italy with her grandmother; and with whom she quickly re-acquainted herself on trips to the Louvre, where she went often, spending hours at a time, in part, perhaps, as a means of escaping the depressing reality of her lugubrious home-life.
The Parisian home of Eugenia Huici de Errázuriz, where in the hallway, a stepladder from a hardware store, red lacquer cupboard and chairs stolen by Jean Cocteau from the Bois De Boulogne
“Figure esquissée sur fond doré” (c. 1930) by Tamara de Lempicka, an amalgam of artist’s idiosyncratic style with the presence of a religious icon, image c/o Phillips
There she discovered the neoclassical work of artists such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), taking his curvaceous, fleshy nudes and putting them through the prism of “modern technology”, whereby they became heavier, more physical and somewhat perverse, in the sense that Lempicka’s particular take on Neoclassicism, rather than celebrating the best of mankind, in effect, memorialises its wanton excess. In a relatively short space of time, Lempicka was able to ingratiate herself within the upper echelons of Parisian society and the avant-garde. It was, in part, as a result of her inherent glamour — in the right light, she could pass for Greta Garbo’s sister (1905-1990) — and with contacts in the world of couture, she was always dressed to the nines in clothes by Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli. Capitalising on her newfound status as a bonafide social butterfly, she gave up on Tadeusz, making a comfortable living painting portraits of the European Elite, as well as friends and lovers. Of her approach, Lempicka explained, “My goal was never to copy, but to create a new style, bright, luminous colours and to scent out elegance in my models.” With a thoroughly modern outlook, she realised image went hand in hand with success, thus, she cultivated a carefully curated public persona; that of a rebel, fighting against stereotypical female roles of domesticity and fashion. This is an attitude that shone through in her art, as in her style and approach, she represented women in an entirely new way, outside the male gaze, and as such, showing female, rather than male desires. Unlike Picasso’s long-suffering muses, Lempicka’s women, by contrast, are empowered, in charge of their own pleasure and able to satisfy their own desires. Through such an approach, although her figures are often nude and highly sexualised, they’re not presenting themselves as commodities on display. Lempicka’s sitters are aware and in control, and through such an approach, the idea of a modern woman, single-minded and ambitious, became not only the norm but celebrated and encouraged.
The apotheosis of her work, the two inextricably intertwined, Lempicka embodied a peculiarly Parisienne trope, la garçonne — a modern, ostensibly liberated woman that became emblematic of the age. In terms of merit, the pessimist might argue she was, in essence, doing nothing new, simply flattering the elite and producing favourable, vainglorious portraits to line the parchment-clad walls of their cigarette-smoke-sheathed Parisian salons. John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), before her, had similar success until his infamous portrait of Madame X (1883-84), depicting a young socialite, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau (1859-1915), elicited the ire, and green-eyed envy of the Parisian haute bourgeois, causing his career to descend into a rapid death spiral. As a means to a meal ticket, she was certainly, by no means, the last to take advantage of high society’s desire for immortality embodied in portraiture. Similarly, decades later, Andy Warhol (1928-1987), another Eastern European immigrant, again, as an outsider, managed to gain the favour of a panoply of avant-garde patrons, depicting many of those in Lempicka’s circle, such as Nelson Rockefeller (1908-1979) and C. Z. Guest (1920-2003) in all their multicoloured screen printed glory; though of course, perhaps precipitated by Jed Johnson’s (1948-1996) decorating bills and, a penchant for Modern Masters, by the 1970s “Warholism had superseded Warhol”, and his art world career began to flounder, heavily criticised for decade dominated by such high profile commissions. Far from the classic trope of an artist as a tortured, ideologically minded revolutionary, Lempicka’s impetus, was, from the outset, fame and fortune; yet, in achieving her ambitions, thereby freeing herself from the shackles of a patriarchal society, she entirely upended the canonical understanding of Western art history, for the first time allowing women to manufacture their own social expectations.
The Paris home of forward-thinking minimalist Eugenia Huici de Errázuriz, demonstrating her unique take on understated elegance, photograph François Koller
Colette Aboucaya (1896-1997) was an entirely different kettle of fish, widowed at a young age she was extremely introverted, at the opposite end of the spectrum, as it were, to Lempicka’s forthright, gregarious nature. That said, their situations were somewhat different, as while both were from comfortable families of the European beau monde, Aboucaya had a sizeable fortune at her disposal, thence, no need to garner attention, thereby making a name for herself, and in turn, a living. Indeed her entrée into the world of French modernism came as a result of her father, Léon Aboucaya (1860-1943), originally from Algeria, who, along with his brother, Samuel, had, in 1928, acquired famed Parisian coachbuilder Henri Binder. In the spirit of the age, their raison d’être was to create the haute couture of automobiles, putting British stalwarts Rolls Royce, Bentley and Daimler in the shade. Executed in rare and exotic materials, each car was conceived as a gesamtkunstwerk, and with no expense spared, the brothers entrusted the workshop of Franco-Swiss artist Jean Dunand (1877-1942) with creating lacquer imitating shagreen, or covered in gold and applied over modernist motifs; the overall effect dazzling in its sophistication, akin to the sort of diamond-encrusted Cartier cigarette cases seen passed around the elegant salons of art patrons Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and Marie-Laure de Noailles (1902-1970). As such, with the aim of ensnaring a refined coterie of wealthy patrons, Dunand’s lacquer designs, comprising dashboards, door interiors, seats and handles, partially or fully decorated with coquille d’œuf or laque arrachée, were exhibited at the landmark 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris, on the Esplanade des Invalides. It was there, accompanying her father, that the artist and Mademoiselle Aboucaya first met, finding a mutual simpatico and shared love of urushi lacquer. For the 1925 exhibition, Dunand had also been entrusted by Maurice Bokanowski (1879-1928), president of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs, to create an extraordinary fumoir for the private apartments of the “Pavillon d’une Ambassade Française”, in which walls panelled in black and red lacquer sat beneath a backlit, silver-gilt ziggurat ceiling.
Of Dunand’s spectacular interior, French film director and screenwriter Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977) wrote in La Renaissance de l’Art that “although the whole is small in size, the overall impression was truly of exceptional quality, and everyone could be proud of this choice and congratulate lacquers from oriental artists and on having been able to apply that secret so felicitously to our modern Western civilisation”. Similarly enamoured, couturier and collector Jacques Doucet (1853-1929), so awestruck upon visiting the pavilion, wrote immediately to Dunand in fevered prose, “I have always admired your work, but what I saw today showed complete mastery and confirmed in every way your greatness as an artist”. Enraptured by Dunand’s unique, unerring vision, Mademoiselle Aboucaya commissioned the artist to design the boiseries of a smoking room for her apartment on the fashionable rue de Monceau. In accordance with her decorator Gérard Mille, Dunand conceived an extraordinary abstracted “palm grove”, in tones of silver, gold and black lacquer; an art moderne, somewhat more masculine interpretation of the sort of feminine, flower-festooned apartments seen frequently during the reign of Louis XV. Mademoiselle Aboucaya, so entranced by the finished result, an iconic expression of French luxury, with its furniture by Japanese artist Katsu Hamanaka (1895-1982), also in black lacquer, upholstered in powder pink silk, and corresponding carpet by Ivan da Silva Bruhns (1881-1990), became so set up on preserving its pastel-hued mise en scène, that she rarely received visitors or, for that matter, even used the opulent cabinet Dunand created for her; moving into the maid’s rooms, at the opposite end of the apartment, the residence remained an untouched time capsule of a bygone era, its doors locked, and windows sheathed in paper so as to blot out sunlight, like a latter-day Satis House. Whilst on the one hand, one might applaud her passion for preservation, on the other it does, in some measure, seem rather a waste, as after her death at 101, the apartment was taken apart by Aboucaya’s nephew and sold off in its parts; the French government seemingly uninterested in preserving what was, in essence, like Jean-Michel Frank’s iconic interiors at de Noailles’ eighteenth-century Beaux-Arts Paris townhouse, Hôtel Bishofsheim, or Pierre Chareau’s (1883-1950) modernist masterpiece Maison de Verre, a national treasure.
A daybed (c. 1935) by Katsu Hamanaka, from the home of Mademoiselle Colette Aboucaya, image c/o Phillips auction house
Although somewhat less discreet, Lempicka, similarly infatuated with Art Deco, took a three-storey townhouse and studio on rue Méchain in the Left Bank, commissioning Robert-Mallet Stevens (1886-1945), one of the most brilliant French modernist designers of the time, to refurnish its interiors. Her extraordinary atelier was well documented in Mobilier et Décoration, with the article’s author, G. Rémon, enthusiastically describing the space, furnished with cutting-edge modernist works by the likes of René Herbst (1891-1982), Djo-Bourgeois (1898-1937), and her sister, architect Adrienne Górska (1899-1969), as a “climat d’idées”, entirely in tune with the prevailing trend for l’art d’habiter. In stark contrast to Mademoiselle Aboucaya’s exotic, cubist-inspired Les Palmier, in which one could, inherently, see the hand of the maker, its interiors, and gleaming chrome fittings, were a precursor to a sea change in decorative arts, influenced by the Union des Artistes Modernes, which were to become more streamlined and stripped of Loosian ornament and excess. Lempicka’s cutting-edge des res, with one wall of the cavernous double-height salon incorporating an American cocktail bar, can to some extent be seen as a stage set, and part of the public persona she so carefully created, as the extravagant protagonist of the European high life. One might even argue, that if there’s a single image in art that encapsulates the Art Deco, it’s Lempicka’s 1928 Autoportrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti). Commissioned for the cover of the German fashion magazine Die Dame, it portrays her as “a symbol of women’s liberation”, whereby the car, in effect, is an allegory for emancipation, with Lempicka, a modern Amazon in a male-dominated world, exchanging her horse for a machine age mode of transport. The tight, post-cubist composition, Hermès helmet and lubricious red lips speak of the high style and lascivious behaviour that defined inter-war Paris, a personification of cold beauty, independence, wealth and inaccessibility.
Yet, a creature of smoke and mirrors, the work is consciously connected to Lempicka’s cult of personality; for in the cold, harsh light of day, her iconic green Bugatti was, in fact, yellow, and it wasn’t a Bugatti, it was a Renault, which was stolen one night when she and her friends were celebrating at Café de la Rotonde in Montparnasse. Not that it mattered much, as with her “killer instinct” (in the words of her daughter) and innate aptitude for self-marketing, she soon joined a glamorous cabal of European avant-garde celebrities — including Marinetti (1876-1944), Cocteau and self-proclaimed superman Gabriele d’Annunzio (1863-1938) — attending Natalie Barney’s (1876-1972) “for women only” afternoon’s and claiming to have snorted cocaine with Nobel prize-winning laureate André Gide (1869-1951). In 1933, Lempicka remarried, becoming Baroness Kuffner, and, despite a radical, feminist outlook, with her title, and husband’s wealth, the compulsion for fame soon dissipated, and as an artist, she quickly lost direction. The age of Art Deco was over, and in 1939, urged by Lempicka, who was partly Jewish, her husband sold his estates in Hungary, and the couple moved to America, where after an unsuccessful foray into abstract expressionism, she succumbed to a somewhat lesser role, that of a chic curiosity, “the painting baroness”. The woman described in life as “a little hot potato” died in 1988 in Mexico, directing that her ashes be scattered over the crater of volcanic Mount Popocatepetl, leaving her rogues gallery of portraits as a unique social document. Although quickly forgotten and overlooked by the annals of history, something now, thankfully, being rectified, the inter-war period was an age when women were not only empowered, but in terms of the artistic current, were leading the way; think of Eyre de Lanux (1894-1996), Eileen Gray (1878-1976), Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) and Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) and in fashion, besides those already mentioned, Madame Grès (1903-1993), Madeleine Vionnet (1976-1975), and Jeanne Lanvin (1867-1946). These extraordinary women not only shaped a new generation, but were also patrons of the arts, commissioning works from leading figures of the day, and contributing to a defining moment in modern history.