Renowned for her stylish portraits of the wealthy Parisian elite, Lempicka soon made a name for herself across the Atlantic. Bolstered by the art and fashion press in Europe, Lempicka’s reputation preceded her in America and in 1927 Vanity Fair devoted an article to the Polish-born socialite painter. By September 1929, Lempicka had arrived in New York.

It was the young millionaire Rufus T. Bush, son of industrialist Irving T. Bush, who persuaded Lempicka to first travel to the United States. Upon seeing her work in Paris, Bush invited the artist to New York where he’d commission her to paint a portrait of his new fiancée, Joan Jeffery. Though the commission proved trying due to the sociable nature of her sitter—Jeffery received a stream of visitors during their sessions—it resulted in one of the artist’s finest portraits (fig. 1). As with the commission (which earned her four times her normal rate), Lempicka’s stay in New York proved fruitful, at least at first. Though her time was ultimately cut short due to the devastating stock market crash just a month after her arrival, Lempicka created a number of other portraits in New York including the radiant Femme à la robe jaune. Author of the catalogue raisonné Alain Blondel describes the present work a picture of 'a young, fair-haired woman in a saffron gown with a grey, stormy sky in the background who wears an air of profound disillusionment as she lies on a sofa in almost the exact pose as Madame Récamier' (Exh. Cat., London, Royal Academy of Arts, Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon, 2004-05, p. 24). It remains unknown if such disillusionment cited by Blondel reflected the artist’s own attitude in the wake of the crash as her recently earned income, planned exhibitions and future commissions quickly evaporated.

Removed from the calamitous temporality, Femme à la robe jaune presents a vision of a starkly modern and self-possessed woman. Much like Lempicka herself (fig. 2), the sitter in the present work exudes a decided sense of independence, even defiance, as her sculpted figure takes up the whole of the composition. While her pose indeed evokes that of David’s Madame Récamier (fig. 3), the effect is wholly distinct. Whereas the French master’s muse exudes a deviously sweet, flirtatious energy, Lempicka’s woman in gold is a force to be reckoned with—elegant, implacable, doubtless.

Indeed, it was masters like David and Ingres whose compositional devices most influenced the artist despite her thoroughly modern pictorial style. Emphasizing Lempicka’s intuitive adherence to Western modes, Germain Bazin states: 'The linea serpentine, to sixteenth-century Italian theorists the supreme expression of beauty, animates Tamara’s figures: with bodies twisting from top to toe they touch the edge of the painted surface at various points… A painting by Tamara is generally presented like a bas-relief with a single, powerful figure filling the whole canvas – to the extent quite often that the head is cut off by the upper edge' (G. Bazin quoted in ibid., p. 19).

Femme à la robe jaune was painted in the same year as her iconic self-portrait, Tamara in the Green Bugatti (fig. 4) which featured on the cover of Die Dame, the leading fashion magazine in Germany, and soon came to represent the ultimate 'hymn to the modern woman'. Lempicka's time in New York filled her with visions of glamorous rapidity and industrialization, the sleek cars and steel skyscrapers of city reappearing in her subsequent canvases.

In 1930, Lempicka returned to France, which was yet to suffer the worst of the global financial collapse. She continued her portraiture until the early 1930s, when a lengthy spell of depression reduced her output and her work shifted from the dazzling Art Deco works upon which she built her career to more somber religious subjects. As her popularity and productivity waned in the 1940s and 50s, Lempicka focused on socialising and traveling with her second husband, Baron Raoul Kuffner. Though she continued to paint through the 1960s, her star had fallen and the artist refused to exhibit, all but giving up the fame she once sought.

However, the year 1970 would mark another monumental shift in Lempicka’s career. Alain Blondel and Yves Plantain, two young dealers who had recently formed the Galerie du Luxembourg in Paris, approached the forgotten icon and persuaded her to exhibit once more. They insisted on seeing her early works—the so-called 'dusty relics' which she had kept in attic storage—and were delighted to instead find a wealth of Lempicka’s most powerful and accomplished works, including Femme à la robe jaune. The resultant 1972 exhibition at the gallery featured only these select masterpieces from 1925-35 and marked an extraordinary moment of rediscovery for the artist. Just before the 1972 exhibition, Femme à la robe jaune was sold to a private collector, with whom it belonged for more than thirty years. Since its rediscovery, Femme à la robe jaune has featured in nearly every major publication on the artist.