Doctor Boucard
The work of Tamara de Lempicka (1894–1980), Polaca painter who spent much of his life in France and the United States, captured the glamor, the elegance and modernity of the 1920s and 1930s. True Art Deco icons, their portraits of socialites and aristocrats, marked by a «Soft Cubism»They mirror their own professional and personal life singularly. After all, as Jean Cocteau noted, she « loved art and high society in equal measure. » From the peculiarity of his work, he himself stated: «Among a hundred paintings, it was always possible to recognize mine »; « The galleries … put me in the best rooms, always to the center, because my art attracted people. »
Emblematic figure of Parisian bohemian, Lempicka was openly bisexual. Cases with women have translated into daring naked in some of their works, as in The beautiful Rafaela (1925). Married to lawyer Tadeusz łempicki, had a daughter, but the union ended in divorce. One of the hands of the husband's portrait – Portrait of a man (1928) – It was painted. In 1934 he married Baron Raoul Kuffner, a Jewish Hungarian, heir to an industrial empire in the food sector.
In 1939, Nazi persecution to Jews led the couple to move to Beverly Hills, California, but the success achieved short of expectations. In 1943, they exchanged Los Angeles for New York, where the artist's style still attracted some wealthy clientele. However, it was increasingly evident that Art Deco's time was over. After a decade of break, Lempicka attempted new artistic approaches, but without significant results. With the death of her husband in 1961, and after three trips around the world, she settled in Houston, where her daughter lived. He abandoned his career and merely redoing some of his old works. In 1974, he moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he died in 1980.
His rediscovery began with an exhibition in Paris in 1972, intensifying after his death. (Nowadays, Madonna is counted among the collectors of her works.) The play Date (1981), by Canadian playwright John Kirizanc, inspired by the relationship he had with the Italian writer Gabriel D'Annunzio (1863-1938), has been on the scene in Los Angeles. In Portugal, it was staged by Carlos Carvalheiro for the Nabantino group Fatias de Cá.
Although it preferred to represent female bodies, including several self-portraits-highlighting that of 1928, the wheel of a green bugatti (actually had a yellow Renault!)-Lempicka produced, in the crazy years of Paris, a great male portrait: that of Dr. Pierre Boucard (that of Dr. Pierre Boucard (image). Wearing a laboratory gap that resembles the rail of a movie heartthrob and turning to the light, the rich and famous French bacteriologist holds a test tube with the right hand, while the left rests in a microscope. It was largely thanks to her patronage that the artist maintained a lush lifestyle. Art collector, Boucard acquired several of his works and ordered him the portrait of his wife and his own. The fortune came from LacTeol®, an antidiarrheal probiotic agent that developed in 1907 from the genus of the genre Lactobacillus.
Currently, lactéol® is still used, although in the form of a post-biotic agent, without living bacteria, containing only its bioactive compounds. At the same time, there is a growing demand from probiotic foods today, namely fermented products such as yogurt, kefir, sauer and kimchi. Its living microorganisms-bacteria or yeast-not only balance the intestinal flora, but can inhibit the growth of pathogenic agents and modulate the immune response, proving to be beneficial to health when consumed in adequate amounts.
The idea of colonizing the intestine with beneficial bacteria came from Franco-Russian microbiologist Ilya Mechnikov (1845-1916)-Nobel Medicine in 1908 for their work in immunology-by observing the longevity of Bulgarians, consumers of large amounts of fermented dairy products. Using a contemporary language, it can be said that it was its ideas that originated the creation, by Boucard, a start-up successful.
THE Doctor Boucard portrait (1928) of Lempicka will be auction at Christie's in London on March 5, with a sale estimate between six and nine million euros. In 2020, the Marjorie Ferry Portrait (1932), already called 'Mona Lisa da Art Deco', established a record, when he was bought in the same auctioneer for 19.5 million euros.
Chemical
