Lempicka's 'Les Deux Amies': two nudes interlaced in sculpted, almost metallic flesh, sharp Art Deco light raking across them while the background folds into cool geometry. Scandalous in 1923 and luminous still, it is intimacy carved as if from polished stone. The bodies do not merely touch; they interlock with the inevitability of architecture, two forms that seem to have been quarried from the same gleaming block and then, impossibly, taught to breathe. Lempicka's raking light treats skin as if it were marble and marble as if it were yearning, so that desire here acquires the cool permanence of sculpture — frozen at its most charged instant and thereby made eternal. What scandalised a salon a century ago now reads as a hymn to closeness rendered monumental, tenderness given the weight of stone. Printed generously at wall scale, every interlocking plane keeps the full, undimmed heat of the original.
- Medium
- Print
- Framing
- Unframed
- Artwork size
- 430 mm × 305 mm
- Collection
- Lempicka
