Female Genealogies of Creation: Marie Darrieussecq and Paula Modersohn-Becker, Tatiana de Rosnay and Tamara de Lempicka

Abstract

ABSTRACT Excluding women’s art from public attention significantly affects the possibility of building female genealogies of creation. As such, women artists must constantly recreate their foremothers, because all too often history has erased them from view. Nonetheless, women creators are redressing this imbalance, by rewriting women into history. This article analyses two such contemporary examples: Marie Darrieussecq’s text on Paula Modersohn-Becker [Être ici est une splendeur: Vie de Paula M. Becker (2016)], and Tatiana de Rosnay’s work on Tamara de Lempicka [Tamara par Tatiana (2018)]. Paula Modersohn-Becker was an artist of many firsts, having painted the first (known) nude self-portrait by a woman, the first (known) nude pregnant self-portrait in art history (destroyed in 1943), and having the first museum in the world dedicated exclusively to the works of a woman (opened in 1927). Tatiana de Rosnay in collaboration with her daughter, Charlotte Jolly de Rosnay, unpacks the glamourous life of Tamara de Lempicka, the queen of Art Deco, highlighting the struggles and identity quests of a woman artist in the Parisian art world of the 1920s. This article comparatively examines the way Darrieussecq and de Rosnay adapt the traditional artist’s biography to facilitate the emergence of female genealogies of creation.