2 Audley Square
Mayfair, London W1K
UK
Founded in 1994, THE COURSE offers art history lectures, opera and literature courses, guided museum visits and London walks.
In this series of 5 lectures, Patrick Bade, looks at the end of the Great War and how the Western World attempted to forget the recent past by launching into a hedonistic decade characterized by cocktails, dance crazes and the jazzy Art Deco style. For those who could not afford Haute Couture and luxury liners there was the glamorous escapist world created by the new Hollywood studios and their European counterparts. Another and quite different response to the war was what Jean Cocteau called “The Call to Order” – a desire to return to the timeless values of Classicism. This course will explore the arts and lifestyles of this fascinating and ultimately doomed period between the wars.
TAMARA DE LEMPICKA
In the final lecture, we will look at the smoothly metallic portraits, nudes and still-lifes of Tamara de Lempicka and how they encapsulate the spirit of Art Deco and The Jazz Age and reflect the elegant and immoral life-style of the wealthy, glamorous and privileged elite in Paris between the wars. Combining a formidable classical technique with elements borrowed from Cubism, de Lempicka’s art represented the ultimate in fashionable modernity, while looking back for inspiration to master portraitists such as Ingres and Bronzino.