Lempicka's 'The Dream' — Rafaela reclining against a deep green ground, a white sheet slipping across her hip, dark cropped hair and a serene tilt of the chin holding the whole composition in a hush. It is the artist's eroticism at its most still and most sculptural — a reproduction of a canvas that once sold for millions. The deep green behind her is not a backdrop but a depth, a velvet dark into which the figure seems to be gently sinking, so that Rafaela appears less to lie upon the surface than to float, dreaming, somewhere just beneath it. The white sheet slips with the slow inevitability of a held breath beginning, at last, to release; the serene tilt of her chin keeps the whole charged scene poised in an exquisite, unbroken hush. Here desire is rendered not as heat but as stillness — eroticism cooled to the temperature of marble and thereby made eternal, a sleeping muse caught in the amber of her own beauty. The green seems to deepen as you look, drawing the eye down and down into a reverie that the price tags of the auction house could never quite contain.
- Medium
- Print
- Framing
- Unframed
- Artwork size
- 430 mm × 305 mm
- Collection
- Lempicka
