Tamara de Lempicka lets her famous geometry soften into sleep: a young woman with marcel-waved curls and a single stroke of scarlet for a mouth, her bare shoulder catching the light as she folds into her own arm. After all the steel-and-chrome glamour, here is the artist at her most tender and most carnal. Floated on a bright white mount in a smoky grey-wood frame, the hush of the scene is sealed behind glass like a held breath. Here Lempicka's signature severity does not vanish so much as melt, the hard Deco planes dissolving into the warm geometry of a body that has at last stopped performing and simply, gorgeously, succumbed. That single scarlet mouth burns against the sleeping pallor like the one unguarded confession in an otherwise composed life, and the bare shoulder gathers the light as tenderly as a lover's hand. To look is to feel like an intruder upon something sacred — the rare, defenceless moment when even an icon clocks out and becomes merely, achingly human — and the smoky grey frame keeps watch over the slumber with the discretion of a closed door we have been improperly, irresistibly invited to peer behind.
- Medium
- Print
- Framing
- Frame a bit broken; passe-partout present but crooked — possibly repairable
- Artwork size
- 480 mm × 685 mm
- Framed size
- 630 mm × 935 mm
