Tamara in the Green Bugatti (Auto-Portrait)
Tamara de Lempicka
The Green Bugatti self-portrait again, this time as a high-gloss poster — Lempicka gloved and goggled and utterly untouchable, the Art Deco woman fused to her own getaway car. Unframed and lacquer-bright, it is the icon in its most immediate, pin-it-up form: all chrome glamour and forward motion. Stripped of the ceremony of framing, the image gains a thrilling insolence — the masterpiece as manifesto, the icon refusing the museum and demanding instead the bedroom wall, the studio door, the front line of someone's daily becoming. Her cool gaze still slides past us with that magnificent indifference, but here, glossed and unbordered, she seems to be accelerating out of art history altogether and into the present tense, a woman perpetually leaving every century she is hung in. The high-gloss surface catches the light like the lacquered flank of the very car she drives, so that the poster itself seems built for speed — a portable shrine to self-invention, ready to be tacked up wherever someone needs reminding that the self, like the Bugatti, is something you choose, polish and floor.
- Medium
- Glossy poster
- Framing
- Unframed
- Artwork size
- 430 mm × 305 mm
