- 38
Tamara de Lempicka
Description
- Tamara de Lempicka
- La Dormeuse (Kizette) I
- Signed T. DE LEMPICKA (on the reverse)
- Oil on panel
- 12 1/4 by 16 1/8 in.
- 31 by 41 cm
Provenance
Sold: Christie’s, New York, May 11, 1994, lot 308
Acquired at the above sale
Exhibited
Paris, Galerie Ror-Volmar, T. de Lempicka, oeuvres récentes et anciennes, 1930-1960, 1961
Paris, Galerie du Luxembourg, Tamara de Lempicka de 1925 à 1935, 1972
Tokyo & Hiroshima, Hiroshima Museum of Arts, Tamara de Lempicka, 1997
Literature
G. Marmori, Tamara de Lempicka, Parma, 1977, p. illustrated p. 125
G. Bazin, Tamara de Lempicka 1920-1960, Tokyo, 1980, no. 64, illustrated in color
Kizette de Lempicka-Foxhall, Passion by Design, New York, 1987, illustrated p. 115
Alain Blondel, Tamara de Lempicka, catalogue raisonné, 1921-1979, Lausanne, 1999, no. B. 136, illustrated in color p. 223
Camilla de la Bédoyère, Art Deco, London, 2005, illustrated in color on the cover
Condition
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.
Catalogue Note
The subject of the sleeping woman was filled with erotic potential, as Picasso would so readily acknowledge in his sumptuous portraits of Marie-Thérèse in 1932. Lempicka’s image is perhaps one of the most intimate and unabashedly sensual renderings of this theme. In La Dormeuse, the figure’s flesh is rendered with imperceptible brushstrokes. Her skin appears to be incandescent as if she is bathed in silver moonlight, and her hair glows with a metallic sheen. Lempicka was receptive to the influence of her colleagues in Weimar Germany, and she readily incorporated the hyper-realism of Neue Sachlichkeit into her own work. But it was her love of the precision and classicism of the Italian Renaissance that had the most profound impact on her compositions. Lempicka frequently acknowledged her indebtedness to the Italian Old Masters and how their style profoundly impacted her art: "I discovered Italy when I was a youngster and my grandmother took me away from the cold climate of Poland, where I was born and lived, to take me to the sunny cities of Florence, Rome, Naples, Venice and Milan. It was under her attentive guidance that my eyes took in the treasures of the Italian old masters, from the Quattrocento, the Renaissance" (quoted in Alain Blondel, op. cit., p. 22).
While much has been written about Lempicka’s reverence for the old masters, equally important to her as an artist were the aesthetic forces of her era, the most influential of which was the American film industry. Lempicka was enthralled with the mystique of Hollywood, eventually moving there in the 1940s with her second husband, Baron Kuffner. She invited film crews to her studio in Paris, where she staged grand entrances and posed for pictures with all the theatricality and panache of a silent film star. One often repeated anecdote is that Lempicka was thrilled to be mistaken once for the film actress Greta Garbo. The artist was enamored by this type of modern glamour, and the models in her portraits often resemble film icons from the early days of Hollywood. This platinum bombshell, depicted with brightly colored lips and nails, calls to mind the passively seductive poses of such 1930s silver-screen legends as Garbo and Jean Harlow. The model for this picture was the artist's teenage daughter Kizette, whom the artist featured in several compositions in the 1920s.
As Patrick Bade explained in his monograph on the artist, "There is no doubt that de Lempicka herself was profoundly influenced by the burgeoning art form of the cinema. In the 1920s as she formed her style, the great Hollywood studios of M.G.M., Paramount, Columbia, Universal and R.K.O. began what has been termed the gold age of Hollywood and their domination of world entertainment. The French and German film industries also enjoyed a golden age of creativity, turning out many of the twentieth century’s finest films in these years. The ubiquity of movies began to influence the way people looked and behaved. De Lempicka’s female subjects with their heavy makeup, perfectly coiffed hair and their theatrical poses and facial expressions full of artificial pathos could have stepped out of the silver screen” (P. Bade, Tamara de Lempicka, New York, 2006, p. 92).