The Last Nude
by Ellis Avery
Riverhead. 320 pages, $25.95
CLAUDE CAHUN, noted lesbian photographer of the 1920’s and 30’s, contended that lesbianism “occurs with special frequency in women of high intelligence.” In The Last Nude, novelist Ellis Avery gives Cahun’s notion of an “aristocracy of taste” quite a workout through Avery’s fictionalization of an erotic painting titled Beautiful Rafaela (1927), by Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka (1898–1980).
Avery, who teaches fiction writing at Columbia University and lives in New York City, became intrigued when she discovered that the last painting Lempicka was working on when she died was a copy of her 1927 painting of Rafaela. Inspired by Lempicka’s art, Avery’s curiosity led her to invent a reason why the enfeebled eighty-year-old returned to this image from the past, one that reconsiders the nature of the relationship between these two women.
The narrative is divided into two sections, “Seduction” and “Betrayal.” Part one is told in the first person by Rafaela. This seduction begins with the artist’s 1929 Self Portrait, which Avery uses as a springboard to describe the meeting between Tamara and her future muse, Rafaela, in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Avery’s Lempicka appears through Rafaela’s eyes to be a cosmopolitan, sophisticated expatriate artist. In the painting, as in Avery’s description, Lempicka wears a fashionable racing cap, leather gloves, and a billowing gray scarf, and she sits in the driver’s seat—the very epitome of the emancipated new woman. Ahead of her time, she has divorced her first husband and moved herself, her daughter, and their dog to Paris where she hopes to make her mark as a painter. It turns out that Tamara is hardly the new woman Rafaela (and the reader) thought she was, a fact Rafaela learns as the plot thickens. The narrative unfolds from Rafaela’s vantage point, which is that of a sixteen-year-old girl fresh off the boat from America. Her freshness is quickly soiled by the sordid necessity of earning her keep in Paris during the interwar period. Tamara and Rafaela’s affair burns up the pages of this book against the already smoldering literary and artistic atmosphere of Paris in the 1920’s. This moment passes in the novel, and Rafaela plunges back into her habit of obsessing over Tamara, who remains an alluring mystery that she worships if only because she doesn’t understand it. All that matters to Rafaela is that Tamara has brought her to a climax she never expected to experience with a woman. The femme fatale that Avery depicts is an ice princess who slides between the shadows and vanishes into the darkness of the lies she lives by. With all the innocence of a sacrificial lamb, Rafaela believes that she’s the sole object of Tamara’s desire. She soon learns otherwise, but this doesn’t prevent her from throwing herself into the tiger’s mouth. Time and time again she falls into Tamara’s bed only to be devoured by her elusive beauty and trapped in the dark rainbows she weaves as she entangles Rafaela in a web of intrigue beyond the pleasures of the flesh. Lempicka draws the girl ever closer only to use her for her own purposes. Granted, Rafaela is no angel either, but she is more victim than victimizer. Lempicka plays her like a concert pianist. By the end of part one, our heroine has been misled and betrayed, and has vainly tried to commit suicide. The muse then disappears from the novel, not to be heard from again until the end of the story. In part two, “Betrayal,” Tamara’s thoughts chatter away as she comments on her life and her adventures. She’s like an ever-shifting mirror constantly splitting into a series of funhouse images like those in Orson Welles’ film Lady from Shanghai. Tamara and her sophisticated, decadent friends use Rafaela as bait with which to attract useful patrons. For Lempicka, the real objective all along is to secure a wealthy and titled husband. She’s hardly the self-reliant new woman Rafaela falls in love with. No, she is a dependent woman looking for a life of luxury that only a wealthy and powerful man can give her despite her lesbian desire. It is for this that she sacrifices Rafaela’s innocent love, leaving the sixteen-year-old Jewish girl devastated. She finds a man, but shortly after the marriage—and with her husband’s consent and understanding—Tamara moves back to Paris with her daughter to pick up where she left off. Once there, she reignites an old passion and happily goes on wrecking other lives, all without guilt or regret. She is above common ethics and morals. But fate catches up with her, forcing her to remake her life repeatedly in a world that’s rapidly descending into darkness. In 1933, she travels to Germany, is detained by the Gestapo, and gets let off with a warning because the SS officer’s wife likes her magazine illustrations. He even toys with asking for her autograph for his wife’s pleasure. He then warns her never to return to Germany. She doesn’t. Wiley Tamara survives the war and winds up in Mexico, where she contends with a resentful sixty-year old daughter, forced to care for her unloving mother—a woman who is fast descending into senility. Even in her dotage, Tamara exudes a sultry eroticism, implausibly exciting herself with the idea of bedding a man forty years her junior. She defies her doctor’s orders, smoking cigarettes in a holder à la Auntie Mame, gasping for breath through an oxygen mask, and talking to the ghosts of her past as she now tries to redress the wrongs of yesteryear—for example, by attempting to copy her 1927 painting of the Beautiful Rafaela. Time finally catches up with the baroness; her hands shake; she has cataracts and she can no longer make the images that she once did. Tamara is like Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach who, as he lies dying, scribbles a few lines, inspired by the youthful Tadzio’s incomparable beauty, harboring vague regrets. The Last Nude is one hell of an interesting story, even if we don’t warm up to either Rafaela or Tamara. What’s fascinating is how Avery has turned Lempicka’s icy eroticism into a richly nuanced page-turner of a novel.
The Rubenesque beauty depicted in Beautiful Rafaela—its monumentality, the charisma of Rafaela’s ample flesh—spills out abundantly from Lempicka’s canvas. This expansive outpouring of luminous young flesh with slightly parted candy-red lips is the ultimate come-on. The absolute sensuality of the image augmented by the girl’s half-closed eyes, suggesting the lingering pleasure of spent passion, seems to flicker in and out of her consciousness as she slips into the background of the picture in final climax. It reminds me of Italian sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (1645–52).
Cassandra Langer, a frequent contributor to these pages, is a writer based in New York City.
