Pencil drawing, partly whisked
Blondel A.146. With the studio stamp lower right. On wove paper by PM Fabriano (with watermark). 28,7 x 15,5 cm (11,2 x 6,1 in)Sheet: 32 x 23 cm (12,6 x 9 in).

We are grateful to Alain Blondel, Paris, for his help in cataloguing this lot.

Tamara de Lempicka achieved a highly distinctive style, drawing in its cool monumentality on Art Deco, more particularly, however, on Alexander Archipenko and Bauhaus influences. Lempicka transferred a subtle, cultured but dramatic staging of her own person to her works, creating a stunningly artificial mannerist style. More compellingly than any of her contemporaries, Tamara de Lempicka, consciously or not, elegantly distilled an era of bourgeois high culture into her work, thus exposing the hollowness of its inner values. With a sure sense of what makes for visual impact, Tamara de Lempica subordinated her works to a design canon that lends them, apart from the self-evident monumentality, an expression of cool objectivity reminiscent of Renaissance painting. The present drawing is far livelier than the painting done at the same time, which is so smoothly, even cloyingly, stylised that it appears to have slid into a surfeit of sleekness. [KD]