Tamara de Lempicka

It is a remarkable experience to encounter someone new, fresh, vigorous, authentic and enchanting.
by Charlie Leck

I did not know of her. She was a no-one in my mind and life.

I stepped into a little, freshly painted room yesterday (the feint aromas still hovered here and there and caused a scratching in my throat). I saw her standing there. She looked certain about herself, but something shouted at me that she was also frightened that I might not recognize her remarkable beauty. There seemed something so dreadfully insane about the look in her beautiful, sparkling eyes. She had come there just to meet me – just to change my life completely.

Like a star-struck, old farmer who has come in off the plain, specks of hayseed still clinging to this spot and that in his gray hair, I came to a sudden halt and stood, frozen, looking at her.

Her frenzied eyes seemed to challenge me, daring me to dismiss her lightly.

Someone off to the side – it was a woman’s voice – introduced me to her.

“Charles, this is Tamara.”

I stood looking at the woman, knowing my life, in that instant, had changed – progressed, deepened, broadened – and become complicated.

“Tamara de Lempicka,” the same voice said again, very softly – in nearly a whisper.

I tried to speak, but my lips and throat seemed frozen and unable to do what I willed. I kept my eyes fixed on hers and she continued to stare into me – not at me, but deeply into my secretive soul.

“You do not know of me?”

The question came as a whisper, barely audible. Still unable to speak, I shook my head very, very slightly. I knew nothing of her! No one else in the room took notice of my ignorance. She did.

“You are something of an ill-bred bore, then?” It was a question. Clearly! She was challenging me to shake my fear of her and to speak – to say something or anything – to defend myself. I felt a quivering of my jaw and my lips trembled.

“I do not know of you,” I stammered, “but, you are beautiful – stunning –  even overwhelming!”

She smiled, but said nothing. She extended her arm and hand. Her palm was downward and her fingertips curled slightly. She was inviting me to lightly take her fingers into my own and to bend, to kiss her soft, white, remarkable hand.

I had never done such a thing. Uncertain, I took her steady, refined fingers into my own and bent. I softly touched my lips to her knuckles. I wondered if it had been proper or at all graceful. I rose and looked into her face and she was smiling in humor.

It had been awkward – not graceful or suitable. Her eyes told me everything. She recognized that I was a dolt and a dunderhead. It humored her. Those eyes were laughing with a fierce joyousness. My face reddened. She flicked her head sideward only very slightly, as if to say, “Oh, it is nothing!”

“Come, sit with me,” she said aloud, “and let us listen to this music together.”

My feet would barely move as she turned and moved into an aisle, toward two empty seats. I commanded them to go, to loosen their grip on the floor beneath me. They obeyed and moved along gracelessly behind the remarkable woman. I observed her magnificent, green dress carefully. It was fitted perfectly to her body. Nothing was wasted; nor did anything need escape. She slid into the chair so gracefully and looked up at me, apparently happy that I had begun to control my frozen limbs. My head was spinning and my heart quivered. She patted the chair next to her. I was pleased that I could sit down.

“There now,” she said, “this should be very nice. You may now relax and be comfortable. You needn’t be so afraid of me. I will not cause you permanent pain.”

So it went on this past Wednesday, when I encountered Tarmara de Lempicka for the first time. She had been born in 1898 in Warsaw, the same year that my father came into the world. She married Tadeusz Lempicki (Tad, as she called him) in 1914, at the all too young age of 16. They married in the Chapel of the Knights in Petrograd and shortly after they moved to Paris, where Tamara began to study art and painting under Andre Lhote. Tad could not find work, but Tamara imagined that she could make a living with her painting. She sold a few things and it encouraged her. Soon, a number of galleries began showing her work and she began to live in the kind of luxury she knew as a child. She traveled widely and her fame spread as she went. She took up with important lovers. She did paintings of her daughter, Kizette, and they become internationally famous. In 1928, she and Tadeusz divorced. Her work continued to sell, even through the years of the great depression. Tamara, in love this time, married the Hungarian, Baron Kuffner, in 1933. It was at the time the Nazis were gaining strength in Europe and she sensed – nearly scented – the troubles ahead.

She is Jewish. She fled, with Kuffner, to America in 1939. They made Beverly Hills their home. The Reinhart Gallery in Los Angeles exhibited her work. In the early 40s, other American galleries began to show her paintings. Kizette joined her mother and step-father in America and young woman married the Texas geologist, Harold Foxhall.

Tamara and Baron Kuffner moved to New York City in 1943 – as the war raged on in Europe.

Kuffner died in 1962 and Tamara moved to Houston to be near her daughter.

In 1972, in Paris, at the magnificent Gallerie du Luxembourg, Alain Blondel organized a retrospective exhibit of Tamara’s work.

In 1974, age 75, Tamara moved to Cuernavaca, in Mexico. In 1979, Kizette, widowed, followed her mother there so that she might care for the aged woman.

Tamara died in her sleep on a March night in 1980. Her ashes are scattered on the Mount Popocatépetl volcanic crater (made famous by Malcolm Lowry’s extraordinary novel, Under the Volcano).

     Popocatépetl     (I was unable to established photo credits.)

     Popocatépetl is southeast of Mexico City, located in the
     states of Puebla, Mexico and Morelos. The volcano is
     over 17,000 feet tall.

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It was Carson Kreitzer, the American playwright, who introduced us. We were at the remarkable Minneapolis Playwright Center.  I was charmed out of my mind and I was left nearly breathless by the beauty of the woman and the expanse of her work. I fell hard for Lempicka – hard as hell! 

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Home Below Zero

We paid another visit to the Minneapolis Playwright Center last night and we were as impressed as we had been on our first visit.
by Charlie Leck

I met the playwright, Dan Dietz, last night. He’s a very pleasant young man and it was nice to chat with him. We sat in on a reading of his play, Home Below Zero. Dietz is obviously very talented. The dialogue in this play was both very realistic and intriguingly compelling.

So natural was the conversation among the characters of this production that it almost seemed its construction had been an operose effort by Mr. Dietz; yet the intensity of the effort is not evident in the naturalness of the stage delivery. That’s what happens when dialogue is so real and authentic. It doesn’t seem that a writer was necessary.

The subject matter was intense and so were the characters. It occasionally seemed that the agonies that surrounded the characters was too much for an audience to bear; however, Dietz always seemed to slide some humor or levity into the situation, at just the right spot, to relieve the droning pain of the situation.

Khaled, a young man from Iraq, has managed to find his way to the frigid climes of northern Minnesota in late winter. He’s come looking for Jeff, an American soldier that he had befriended during the war in his native land. It was a love for heavy-metal music that had brought them together. Jeff’s father, Ben, and Khaled don’t hit it off. Jeff is in a long term coma in a Minneapolis veterans hospital, as the result of an IED explosion in Iraq, and Ben wants to blame Khaled for this and for all his family’s woes – the behavior of a renegade daughter, his own unemployment and the looming mortgage foreclosure on his house.

The production experiments with some interesting sound effects, including a live drummer on stage, and it is all pulled off very successfully. We sat riveted through the two act production and felt we’d spent a very worthy evening in the little lab-based playwright center over in south Minneapolis. The actors who read the lines were magnificent and several had to transform themselves into new attitudes and behaviors during the two hour production – and they did it with great skill.

This is a play that will find its way to a significant stage somewhere quite soon. Dietz, as a result of reactions from the audience last night, will touch up a thing here and there and get it ready for a real stage opening. I want to know where and when because I’d like to be there.

Home Below Zero was a terrific success! The presentation last night is a part of the Ruth Easton New Play Series as a result of a grant from the Ruth Easton Fund of the Edelstein Foundation.

I wrote an earlier blog about the Minneapolis Playwright Center.

You can visit the Minneapolis Playwright Center web site here!

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Minneapolis Playwright Center

We had a smashing time at the Minneapolis Playwright Center on Saturday evening and I’m anxious to go there again sometime!
by Charlie Leck

Mat Smart’s play, Tinkers to Evers to Chance, is still in its infancy. I think it’s going to be a terrific work and it was fun to be in on the developmental stages of Smart’s writing. It’s based on the great double-play combination of the dead-ball era, Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and Frank Chance. They played for the Chicago Cubs at the West Side Grounds on the city’s north side.

These are the saddest of possible words:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double-
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."

Francis Pierce Adams, a New York columnist, wrote the little ditty about the great legends of the game while he was on his way to the Polo Grounds. He needed “filler” for one of his columns. Little did he know his poem would be recited generations after he wrote it and that he’d make this trio of players so furiously famous and send them on to the Hall of Fame. These three guys were constant problems for the Giants ball club and Adams granted them even more acclaim with his poem. (They played together for the Cubbies from 1902 to 1912.)

Johnny Evers is one of the two central figures in Smart’s play. Smart makes him into a compelling character. The play has a time-warp that makes it impossible for Evers to have been around to really meet one of the other lead characters (he died in 1947 at the age of 65), but Smart is dealing with a grandmother, her daughter and her granddaughter in this time-line and the audience has to be on its toes to keep up with the time-period swings. This is a problem that wouldn’t have happened had more actors been involved to help us identify various and changing characters.

We saw the presentation at the Minneapolis Playwright Center and all the parts were read by only two actors who, even though they had the scripts in hand and didn’t have the benefit of a full-fledged set, did an absolutely wonderful job.

Smart’s dialogue got a little tedious at points in the second of the two acts, but I don’t think that’s anything that he can’t work out and he gets the benefit of hearing reactions from the audience that watched the work in the lab setting.

I liked what I saw at the Center and, in one evening, I became a total fan and look forward to going back there again.

Here’s what goes on at the Playwright Center and this is its concept:
“Theatre begins here,” is what their tag line says and I guess it literally does. It’s much like a writer’s lab. A play writer can try things out in miniature or immature form and see if his work is making sense and receive constructive criticism.

“…It gives the nation’s most exciting writers the time and tools to develop new work for the stage! The Center’s Core Writers travel to Minneapolis from across the country to move their plays closer to production with the support of the finest dramaturgical minds in the nation, under the leadership of Resident Director Hayley Finn.”

Dramaturgical, ey! Now there’s a new word for me. I love new words!

And the crowd at the Center was new for us, too – and very enthused and spirited and excited about watching this embryonic work. The spirit of the place was neat and worked its way it our systems.

I’ll become a supporter of the Center and budget a few bucks for them next year. If you love alive theater, you might want to think about it also. Certainly you’ll want to get familiar with this place that works out of a cute, old church in south Minneapolis.

By the way, we had a wonderful dinner at a terrific restaurant before we went over to the Center and I recommend it enthusiastically. If you like Thai food, you’ll be pleased if you dine at True Thai on East Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis (only four blocks or so from the Center itself).

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