Tamara de Lempicka at the wheel of her own myth: gloved, helmeted, lacquer-lipped, she steers the emerald Bugatti straight out of the Jazz Age and never once looks at the road. It is the original self-as-icon — the Art Deco woman as her own fast machine. Here it gets the full couture treatment: a layered geometric passe-partout in charcoal, teal and slate that frames her like the cockpit of the very car she drives. Her gaze slides past us with the magnificent indifference of a woman who has somewhere far more interesting to be, and her cool steel glamour is not a mask over the self but the self entire — the face she chose, polished, lacquered and floored to the boards. Flesh here aspires to the condition of chrome; ambition wears lipstick; the future is a colour and the colour is green. The stepped passe-partout, charcoal folding into teal into slate, encloses her like the strata of a luxury she has hewn from sheer will, so that even the framing itself seems to accelerate, drawing the eye inward toward a woman who is forever leaving us beautifully, expensively, in the dust.
- Medium
- Print
- Framing
- Black frame with layered geometric passe-partout (charcoal/teal/slate), glazed
- Artwork size
- 250 mm × 340 mm
- Framed size
- 530 mm × 530 mm
