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Lot Essay
Lempicka's Portrait d'une jeune femme is an intimate, bust-length representation of a glamorous young woman from the late 1920s, at the height of the artist's career as a society portraitist. Like Lempicka herself, the subject of this portrait radiates European cosmopolitanism, but also expert cosmetic skill: the woman's skin is preternaturally pale, smooth and matte; her mauve shadow and kohl liner has been applied to her lids with a exaggerated feline flick, embellishing her gray-green eyes; and her plump pout has been glossed with a rich crimson lipstick. This painterly artifice serves to emphasize the nearly abstract, sculptural quality of the woman's face.
Lempicka further employed dramatic chiaroscuro, a Baroque painting technique of contrasting light and shadow, in order to emphasize the woman's cheekbones and nose. The vigorous, twisting, polished figures in Lempicka's work speak to her close study of both Italian and Northern European art of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Her subject in Portrait d'une jeune femme appears to emerge from the darkness and twists her neck to look over her shoulder, like an Art Deco version of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.
The meticulous makeup and curved, bare shoulder on display in Portrait d'une jeune femme are all signs of traditional feminine beauty; yet the woman's sharp, seductive expression and bobbed auburn hair are both more modern and androgynous. Laura Camerlengo, the curator in charge of costume and textile arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and a contributor to the recent retrospective exhibition dedicated to Lempicka, described the influence of menswear upon women's fashion - and upon Lempicka's representation of women—between 1918 and 1939:
"As women entered the labor force in vast numbers during World War I, many adopted men's attire for ease of movement...Masculinized forms of grooming and dress such as cropped hairstyles, pants and straight dresses with shortened skirts remained popular in the postwar era, further enhancing physical freedoms and challenging traditional gender expectations. Often called la mode garçonne, these fashions are reflective of the eponymous contemporary cultural figure who embodied feminine and masculine qualities, once thought dichotomous, in physical appearance and behavior" ("Fashioning 'The Modern Woman'" in Tamara de Lempicka, G. Mori and F. Rinaldi, eds., New Haven, 2024, p. 128).
Living in Paris in the 1920s, Lempicka was attentive to these glamorous, gender-bending cultural trends. She, like her elite clientele, indulged in both soft, luxurious materials and sharp, avant-garde tailoring. Fashion magazines, including Die Dame, Vogue, Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar, published images of Lempicka's cutting-edge portraits, but also photographs of the artist herself sporting a flapper's bob and the latest haute couture. Lempicka thus cultivated her own distinctive personal and painterly style.
Lempicka earned an flamboyant international reputation, not only for her taste for fashion and her sensual approach towards her paintings (characterized by provocative subjects, rich jewel tones, slick surface texture, and bulbous forms) but also for her own omnivorous sexual appetite; she famously took both male and female lovers throughout her life. That libertine energy is on full display in the Portrait d'une jeune femme, in which the woman both provokes and performs pleasure. Lempicka's depictions of female subjects were also somewhat autoerotic; in the words of one art historian, "Lempicka's representations of the female body speak of an interaction between her identification with her subject matter and her sexual desire...This concept of a shifting female gaze permits speculation about the artist's individual dynamics of spectatorship, but also about those of her intended audience and patrons, who ranged from wealthy heterosexual male industrialists to openly lesbian Parisian aesthetes" (P.J. Burnhaum, Women Artists in Interwar France: Framing Femininities, New York, 2016, p. 191).
Lempicka further employed dramatic chiaroscuro, a Baroque painting technique of contrasting light and shadow, in order to emphasize the woman's cheekbones and nose. The vigorous, twisting, polished figures in Lempicka's work speak to her close study of both Italian and Northern European art of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Her subject in Portrait d'une jeune femme appears to emerge from the darkness and twists her neck to look over her shoulder, like an Art Deco version of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.
The meticulous makeup and curved, bare shoulder on display in Portrait d'une jeune femme are all signs of traditional feminine beauty; yet the woman's sharp, seductive expression and bobbed auburn hair are both more modern and androgynous. Laura Camerlengo, the curator in charge of costume and textile arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and a contributor to the recent retrospective exhibition dedicated to Lempicka, described the influence of menswear upon women's fashion - and upon Lempicka's representation of women—between 1918 and 1939:
"As women entered the labor force in vast numbers during World War I, many adopted men's attire for ease of movement...Masculinized forms of grooming and dress such as cropped hairstyles, pants and straight dresses with shortened skirts remained popular in the postwar era, further enhancing physical freedoms and challenging traditional gender expectations. Often called la mode garçonne, these fashions are reflective of the eponymous contemporary cultural figure who embodied feminine and masculine qualities, once thought dichotomous, in physical appearance and behavior" ("Fashioning 'The Modern Woman'" in Tamara de Lempicka, G. Mori and F. Rinaldi, eds., New Haven, 2024, p. 128).
Living in Paris in the 1920s, Lempicka was attentive to these glamorous, gender-bending cultural trends. She, like her elite clientele, indulged in both soft, luxurious materials and sharp, avant-garde tailoring. Fashion magazines, including Die Dame, Vogue, Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar, published images of Lempicka's cutting-edge portraits, but also photographs of the artist herself sporting a flapper's bob and the latest haute couture. Lempicka thus cultivated her own distinctive personal and painterly style.
Lempicka earned an flamboyant international reputation, not only for her taste for fashion and her sensual approach towards her paintings (characterized by provocative subjects, rich jewel tones, slick surface texture, and bulbous forms) but also for her own omnivorous sexual appetite; she famously took both male and female lovers throughout her life. That libertine energy is on full display in the Portrait d'une jeune femme, in which the woman both provokes and performs pleasure. Lempicka's depictions of female subjects were also somewhat autoerotic; in the words of one art historian, "Lempicka's representations of the female body speak of an interaction between her identification with her subject matter and her sexual desire...This concept of a shifting female gaze permits speculation about the artist's individual dynamics of spectatorship, but also about those of her intended audience and patrons, who ranged from wealthy heterosexual male industrialists to openly lesbian Parisian aesthetes" (P.J. Burnhaum, Women Artists in Interwar France: Framing Femininities, New York, 2016, p. 191).