Tamara de Lempicka

Sale: Claude Aguttes, Paris, 21st October 2005, lot 22
Private Collection (purchased at the above sale)
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Tamara de Lempicka, Annotated-Photographic Album, Lempicka Archives, Houston, no. 54
Die Wochenschau, Girardet, Essen, 9th August 1931, illustrated
Marc Vaux, Fonds Lempicka, Paris, 1971, no. 54
Germain Bazin & Hiroyuki Itsuki, Tamara de Lempicka, Tokyo, 1980, p. 17
Gioia Mori, Tamara de Lempicka – Paris 1920 -1938, Florence, 1994, no. 112, illustrated p. 211
Alain Blondel, Tamara de Lempicka, Catalogue Raisonné, 1921-1979, Lausanne, 1999, no. 140, illustrated p. 226

The panel is stable and has a small old crack on the right edge, visible on the reverse, probably original. Apart from some spots and areas of retouching along the left, right and top framing edges, visible under ultra-violet light, this work is in very good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the woman's face has a slightly less warm tonality in the original.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Tamara de Lempicka’s depictions of women are amongst the most striking and sensual of the 20th Century. Sainte Thérèse d’Avila is an extraordinary example of the artist’s idiosyncratic cohesion of traditional painting techniques and bold compositional arrangements. The isolation of the woman’s features framed by her chromium coloured coif intensifies her expression and references the precious grounds used in religious icons, whilst subtly introducing an art-deco inflected aesthetic.

Lempicka was born in Poland and lived in St. Petersburg in her youth. In 1918 she came to Paris and spent the rest of her life cultivating a glamorous international persona. She began exhibiting her work in the Paris salons in 1922, and through her exposure to avant-garde art, she derived a distinct style of painting that was unlike most of her male contemporaries. Although loosely tied to the geometric aesthetic of Cubism and the proportionality of neo-Classicism, Lempicka's painting, characterised by its razor-sharp draughtsmanship, theatrical lighting and sensual modelling, was unlike that of any artist of her day.


The subject of the present work, St. Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582), was a Spanish Carmelite nun who became a prominent mystic and Counter-Reformation writer. In her seminal autobiography she wrote of the various states of religious meditation and prayer as well as of the religious visions she suffered which were central to her devotional practice. This highly evocative volume inspired many artists who drew from her ornate language to create similarly powerful works of art both spiritual and secular. Throughout the 19th Century depictions and descriptions of St. Teresa of Ávila’s life and work informed portrayals of female characters by Thomas Hardy and George Eliot in their respective novels Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Middlemarch.


Undoubtedly the most famous depiction of St. Teresa of Ávila and the inspiration for the present work, is Bernini’s Baroque masterpiece Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Rome (fig. 1), which was drawn from the Saint’s rapturous description of one vision in particular: ‘I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it’ (St. Teresa of Avila, The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, of the Order of Our Lady of Carmel, London & New York, 1904, p. 256). Lempicka’s own thrilling, subtly Sapphic, interpretation glories in the sexualised persona that Bernini’s sculpture suggests. The central element of the present work is the ecstatic Saint’s parted lips, which indicate erotic pleasure, also common to other explicit portrayals of femininity in the early 20th century including Klimt’s gold-grounded Judith I (fig. 2). The artist’s devotion to the female form is well recorded by her sumptuous portraits and nudes (fig. 3), and Sainte Thérèse d’Avila is a celebration of female sexuality.


Throughout the 1930s Lempicka tackled religious subjects, resulting in a few genuinely pious images such as the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes’ La Mère supérieure painted in 1935. According to her biographer Alain Blondel, these images were symptomatic of the psychological upset caused by Lempicka's turbulent private life. He writes: ‘This mental affliction slowed her production considerably. Such was her distress that only religious subjects had any meaning for her. She painted several young Madonnas with pure, oval faces. More testing subjects, old or blind people, bore witness to ever more intense soul-searching. Her increasing uncertainty persuaded her to refer constantly to the art of the Renaissance. She was determined to pit herself against the old masters, and made a number of replicas and compositions inspired by paintings she had seen in museums or in books. The Madonna [fig. 4], for example was inspired by a drawing by Michelangelo, now in the Louvre’ (A. Blondel, Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon (exhibition catalogue), Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2004, p. 27). However the majority of these paintings seem to revel in a potent combination of the sacred and the profane – of which the present work is a preeminent example.