The answer is less punchline and more through-line, each of these seemingly disparate elements depicting the work of three female artists – pioneers in their trade, exacting in their vision and misunderstood by the society that espoused them. These three women are Meret Oppenheim, Tamara de Lempicka and Hedy Lamarr and the society that produced them was the 1930s – an era of superlative art moments and depraved political movements.

 Jonathan Freedland at the Guardian characterised the 1930’s as representing ‘a kind of nadir in human affairs’ – it was a decade bookended by the joint megaliths of Communism in Revolutionary Russia and the ascendancy of Fascism in Germany and Italy. It was the decade that saw the final death rattles of British Imperialism and in turn the dawn of the commodity – cars, radio, electric lighting, all those things that bring us a little further in from the dark. In America, the 1930’s were retrospectively a bittersweet time – a flash-in-the-pan moment of decadence and innovation swiftly smothered by the Great Depression and a second World War. Hypothetically-speaking, in America, if you were affluent enough and white enough, you could spend the morning reading hard-boiled Pulp fiction in your gleaming Art-Deco mansion, catch a matinee film at the pictures (Hollywood’s megalomania had just begun to grind into gear), followed by some swing Jazz at a bar – Duke Ellington or Cab Calloway— and still be back home in time to catch President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chat on the radio. It was a time when industrial prominence, architectural supremacy and artistic exuberance brushed shoulders with various shifting forms of violent extremism and social control – a kiss couldn’t last longer than three seconds on the silver screen under the Hays Code and the queue for a bowl of soup wound itself around three blocks. Frank O’Hara perfectly depicted the conflicting forces of the era in his poem Rhapsody - “515 Madison Avenue, door to heaven? Portal. Stopped realities and eternal licentiousness, or at least the jungle of impossible eagerness, your marble is bronze and your lianas elevator cables swinging from the myth of ascending […] I historically belong to the enormous bliss of American death.” Despite it being written almost two decades after the 1930’s, his evocation of myth, ascendancy and excess in the face of fatality is nonetheless characteristic of that era. 

The Baroness and the Brush 

Generally speaking, people either flourished or floundered in this decade. Tamara de Lempicka, an immigrant from Eastern Europe was one such individual to capitalise on the ground swells of authoritarianism and artistic panache distinctive of the era. Her work is perhaps the most idiosyncratic of the times – monstrously large women adorn her paintings, their soft thighs and throats rendered in architectural dimension, their eyes upturned like saints or narrowed in shrewd perception. They are portrayed in deep mellifluous colours, jade green, burnt red, obsidian black, driving sleek cars, playing instruments or posturing in front of dystopian cityscapes. Through de Lempicka’s eyes, women are both powerful artifice (their bodies not dissimilar from the Art Deco buildings that surround them) and cunning subjects. In the same motion these women embody the platonic ideals of Western female beauty – pale, athletic, glamorous, and subvert it, their industrial limbs and distracted gazes hinting at a kind of pious indifference. Fiona MacCArthy at the Guardian typified de Lempicka’s subjects as exuding ‘the dark and dubious glamour of authoritarian discipline’ and it’s not difficult to read in them O’Hara’s notion of the enormous bliss of American death. In one image, a nude woman fills the canvas, her body arched and geometric, her head thrown back in what could be pleasure or disinterest. Blink and you’d miss her hands, at the bottom of the canvas, chained together. Such is her enormous bliss that we almost neglect to see the symbols of ‘death’ and ‘authoritarian discipline’ right in front of us. A nomadic figure, de Lempicka requested her ashes to be sprinkled atop the Popocatépetl volcano in Mexico, one last great gesture to the magnitude and power of her vision.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Around the same time de Lempicka was binding the female form to canvas, Louis B. Mayer at MGM Studios was attempting to bind a young Austrian actress to the silver screen. She was twenty-three-year-old Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, recently escaped from her controlling husband via Paris – (where, dear reader, de Lempicka was consorting with the bold and beautiful) and ready to embrace the charms of Hollywood. Back in Europe, she’d already made bold strides in cinema – her 1933 Hungarian film Ecstasy becoming notorious for showing the actresses’ face in the throes of orgasm. To replicate the desired effect, she had requested to be pricked with a pin. Needless to say, it would never have passed the Hays Code over the pond. Hedy Lamarr (as she swiftly re-christened herself) was a lonely woman. Surrounded by approximations of great wealth and prosperity, Hedy found herself lost and alone – choosing to swim for hours on end in her agent’s crystalline pool rather than face the crowds at the beaches, speaking about herself in the third person, dutifully playing the role of Most Beautiful Woman in the World. Her life seemed to be one long analogy of her earliest controversy – the prick of a pin substituting real pleasure, and real sensation. She was like one of de Lempicka’s painted women – untouchable and remote, a series of beautiful surfaces that appealed so greatly to a society trying its hardest to deny the darkness it was fostering. That such a decade could produce The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, by some kind of logic infers that it could also disrupt her – this was after all, an era in which rigorous control bled into all areas of culture and society. While her visage shimmered on the big screen, swooning under the three-minute embraces of her co-stars, Lamarr worked fervently with a team to co-invent an early version of ‘frequency-hopping spread spectrum’. To you or I, that’s a piece of technology that prevents radio eavesdropping, making it invaluable to torpedo guidance and, by extent, mass destruction. Not only that, but in her quieter seasons, she began selling War Bonds – offering kisses to any fool who purchased $25,000 worth of the bonds. It appeared war really was the plaything of man’s ego. Lamarr was the quintessential smoke screen – her beauty and sweetness (those long-weaponized principles of femininity) serving to distract from an industrialised mission of killing. 

Sexless, Featureless, Placeless

If both de Lempicka and Lamarr were spiritual children of the 1930s – their essential appeal lying in the seedy glamour they exuded and the veins of authoritarianism that suppressed and facilitated them – then Meret Oppenheim was a stranger in her generation. Frank O’Hara put it wonderfully in his poem Napatha – “we were waiting to become part of our century”. Like de Lempicka and Lamarr, Oppenheim was an eternal immigrant – born in Berlin in 1913 and fulfilling her artistic legacy in the wide, shining streets of Manhattan. Her name means ‘wild child who lives in the woods’ and her work was suitably fierce. Rather than wait to become part of her century – whose running list so far included a handful of revolutions, a world war, a mass depression and the beginnings of totalitarianism – she forged for herself an alternate reality. Oppenheim was fascinated with dreams. She was influenced by the work of Carl Jung and recorded and analysed her own dreams throughout her life. For Oppenheim, dreams were not merely spectral episodes but directly analogous to the subconscious mind. If de Lempicka and Lemarr were masters at shaping surfaces for the hungry eye, then Oppenheim was strictly concerned with subtext. Her most famous work, Breakfast in Fur is a cup and saucer made of fur. A commentary on domestic furnishings and the subjugation of women, it was bought by MoMA for $50 in 1936 – making Oppenheim The First Lady of MoMa. Far more interesting however, is her less popular painting Sitting Figure with Folded Hands, which Carolyn Lancher described as ‘sexless, featureless, placeless – a portrait of the attitude of its maker’. It is an empty image, a blank outline of a face in profile, a dark, shapeless torso and crudely realised folded hands. But it is also incendiary in its insistence on the form and surface of the sitter. Oppenheim seems to be saying ‘Here! Have your beautiful, insentient forms! Have your female body sitting empty, ready for thought or persuasion to fill her!’. It’s a different kind of surface from de Lempicka and Lamarr, because it is not beautiful to look at – it is authoritarian in its mode of simplicity and perhaps even prescient in its view of the sitter as being without identity -  a cog in the apparatus of social control.  

By the time the 1940’s came around, all traces of the bright-eyed, seductive 30’s were long dead, snuffed out by the gruesome realities of mass poverty and war. It’s legacy in history will forever be one marred by the uncomfortable truths it tried so hard to stifle – that people’s livelihoods are tenuous and can sometimes depend on a bowl of soup, that the American dream is indivisible from the immigrant experience, that endless beautiful surfaces can only distract the eye for so long. O’Hara’s enormous bliss of American death exists in de Lempicka’s images of powerful women bound to chains and buildings, Lamarr’s curtailed existence within Hollywood, her approximation of desire and happiness. It belongs to the time-managed kisses of the Hays Code, the $50 for Oppenheim’s work of art, the insistence on power and magnificence over human mess and authenticity. It all comes down to the idea that The Most Beautiful Woman in the World Sells War Bonds. That violence is a game of distractions and at a certain point, even striking diversions fail in their bid to supplant the awful truth.