Lempicka's estranged husband Tadeusz, painted in cold elegance against a forest of skyscrapers — black overcoat, severe mouth, one hand poised, the city rising like ambition behind him. Famously she left a hand unfinished to mark their unravelling marriage, and the quiet rage still smoulders in his face. A reproduction carrying a whole doomed romance. That deliberately abandoned hand is the cruellest, most eloquent brushstroke in all her work — a love withdrawn mid-gesture, a portrait left bleeding at the wrist, the canvas itself made to suffer the incompleteness of a marriage that would not hold. Tadeusz stands sheathed in black against the cold ascending geometry of the modern city, his severe mouth set in the expression of a man being painted by a woman who no longer adores him and will not pretend otherwise. The skyscrapers behind him climb with the indifferent ambition that, perhaps, came between them. It is the rare portrait that doubles as a divorce decree, every elegant plane of it humming with restrained fury — and the chill of that unfinished hand reaches out across the years to touch something cold in the viewer's own.
- Medium
- Print
- Framing
- Unframed
- Artwork size
- 430 mm × 305 mm
- Collection
- Lempicka
