Art Sunday; Lempicka, or masterpiece meets mass market.

Art Sunday, master piece meets mass market.

Lempicka

This lady artist came from a wealthy family and her story is, in parts romantic, and in parts tragic. She fell in love with a man she didn’t know, and resolved to meet and marry him. She was one of the great female artists; she painted a series of portraits of her daughter but neglecting and ignored the daughter. 

Her work is striking and original, I love her work but so do many other people. Her work is sought after and collected by Madonna, Jack Nicholson and singer-actress Barbra Streisand.
 
This is what Wikipedia has to say about her. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamara_de_Lempicka

Born into a wealthy and prominent family, her father was Boris Gurwik-Górski, a Polish lawyer, and her mother, the former Malvina Decler, a Polish socialite. Maria was the middle child with two siblings. 

She attended boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, and spent the winter of 1911 with her grandmother in Italy and on the French Riviera, where she was treated to her first taste of the Great Masters of Italian painting. 

In 1912, her parents divorced and Maria went to live with her wealthy Aunt Stefa in St. Petersburg, Russia. When her mother remarried, she became determined to break away to a life of her own. In 1913, at the age of fifteen, while attending the opera, Maria spotted the man she became determined to marry. 

She promoted her campaign through her well-connected uncle and in 1916 she married Tadeusz Łempicki (1888–1951) in St. Petersburg—a well-known ladies' man, gadabout, and lawyer by title, who was tempted by the significant dowry. 

In 1917, during the Russian Revolution, Tadeusz was arrested in the dead of night by the Bolsheviks. Maria searched the prisons for him and after several weeks, with the help of the Swedish consul, she secured his release. They traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark then London, England and finally to Paris, France to where Maria's family had also escaped, along with numerous upper-class Russian refugees.

To read the complete story go here, its well worth reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamara_de_Lempicka



BUT……………..

these particular paintings were not painted by her!! 
These are just a few of the hundreds and hundreds of replica paintings produced every day in a Chinese village called Dafen. Until a couple of days ago I didn’t know this place existed, and then I watched a documentary. Apparently, it’s a village in China that specialises in hand crafted reproduction art. This is not ‘fake art’; no one is trying to pass it of as the original. The artists involve are all graduates of Chinese Art Colleges and they are hand picked as the best and most talented. To them technique is every thing, they painstakingly copy the masterpieces of western art. I thought it all sounded a bit bizarre when I saw the documentary. Now I’m not so sure. I genuinely do admire this womans’ work, and I have in the past bought ‘prints’ of famous art works including hers. But a print never captures the essence of a painting. Now I’m thinking, well………….I’m not Madonna, no way could I ever afford an original piece of art, but if there was a piece I particularly wanted, maybe this is the next best thing. It’s certainly better than any other reproduction, be it print, photograph, cheap copy or any thing else. These work shops and studios remind me of the way the old renaissance masters crated their work, they had teams of apprentice craftsmen working for them and each of these workers had their own speciality. Some specialised in skies and some in buildings. As they progressed they were given more and more responsibility and eventually, they could become artists in their own right. Renaissance   artists didn’t see themselves in the same way as contemporary artists do, to them it was a craft to be perfected over time. Maybe that’s the way we should see these talented Chinese copy artists. What ever you think of them, technically the are brilliant, and what they o is certainly thought provoking.

And if you do want to own a particular masterpiece; this is one of the many sites selling them to the western market.

Shop online for a masterpiece.

http://dafenvillageonline.com/