塔瑪拉·德·藍碧嘉

卡洛·格拉西，意大利（1932年購自畫家）
沃特·哈斯，瑞士（1982年或之前購入）
私人收藏，美國
巴里·費里德曼有限公司，紐約（1983年或之前購入）
1990年購自上述公司

巴黎，佛福堤畫廊，1932年，（畫名《一雙密友》）

洛杉磯，美國退伍軍人協會荷里活分會，〈塔瑪拉〉，1984年，品號17

羅馬，法國學院（美第奇別墅）；蒙特利爾，蒙特利爾美術館，〈塔瑪拉·德·藍碧嘉：優雅與暴烈之間〉，1994年，圖錄載彩圖（羅馬展覽品號31，蒙特利爾展覽品號28）

塔瑪拉·德·藍碧嘉，《攝影集註釋》，藍碧嘉檔案，休斯頓，1923-33年，品號64

伊薩·薩斯拉斯卡，〈塔瑪拉·德·藍碧嘉〉，《當代女性》，華沙，1932年7月20日，752頁載圖

馬克·沃，《藍碧嘉作品集》，國家現代藝術博物館，巴黎，1972年，品號64，頁碼不詳

熱爾曼·巴贊及五木寬之，《塔瑪拉·德·藍碧嘉》，東京，1980年，品號28，載圖，頁碼不詳

費德里克·澤里，〈塔瑪拉：性別與繪畫〉，《新聞報》，1987年12月13日，載圖，頁碼不詳

吉瑟特·藍碧嘉-霍士鶴男爵夫人及查爾斯·菲利普斯，《刻意的激情：塔瑪拉·德·藍碧嘉的藝術與時代》，紐約，1987年，91頁載彩圖

艾倫·托曼，《塔瑪拉·德·藍碧嘉：巴黎的藝評家與藝術家》，柏林，1993年，品號52，列於220頁

吉勒斯·內雷，《塔瑪拉·德·藍碧嘉1898-1980年》，科隆，1991年，32頁載彩圖

阿蘭·布隆代爾，《塔瑪拉·德·藍碧嘉專題目錄1921-1979年》，洛桑，1999年，品號B.128，214頁載彩圖

帕特里克·巴德，《塔瑪拉·德·藍碧嘉》，紐約，2006年，49頁載彩圖

Bold and stylized in its presentation, Les Jeunes filles is a highly charged and suggestive double-portrait. Set against a Cubist-inspired urban background of skyscrapers, Lempicka’s Les Jeunes filles is both aggressively modern and overtly sensual in sensibility. Tamara de Lempicka’s distinctive, boldly cosmopolitan portraits and nudes, predominately of women, were the ideal means of conveying the opulence and liberated boldness of the années folles, Paris’s legendary Jazz Age. Perhaps the most representative painter of the Art Deco style, Lempicka’s tantalizing portraits have come to personify the time. Born in Poland, Lempicka lived, as a child, in St. Petersburg, before moving to Paris in 1918. She spent the 1920s and 30s cultivating a glamorous international persona and establishing herself as the quintessential portrait painter to the new social elite. Les Jeunes filles is rare in its depiction of, rather than a single portrait, two entwined figures. The elegant, simplified angles and planes of the womens' bodies, shaped into shaded curvilinear forms, with luminous skin and hair which glows with a metallic sheen exemplifies the most daring characteristics of Lempicka's work. The chromium and crimson colored coifs serve to frame the model’s features and their largely indecipherable facial expressions, while their red lips provide dashes of pure, unmodulated color. The brightly hued scarf sweeps across the lower register of the composition, with eloquent folds that contain dramatically rendered shadows, providing brief, tantalizing glimpses of the exposed flesh of one of the figures. With its exceptional technical quality, the smooth and brilliant rendering of colors, and its striking depiction of its subject, Les Jeunes filles is an elegant development of the artist’s take on a variety of painterly styles, where shapes and composition are carefully measured to create a pleasing and harmonious balance.  

In pioneering her own distinct style, Lempicka absorbed a great variety of elements from the avant-garde art movements of her time – the geometric aesthetic and fragmented perspective of Cubism, the vibrant color palette of the Fauves, the proportionality of Neo-Classicism, the dynamic lines of Futurists, the dream-like spatial logic of Surrealism and the razor-sharp draughtsmanship and hyper-realism of the Neue Sachlichkeits in central Europe – blending these styles and influences with her love of the Italian Old Masters to an extraordinary effect. As Magdeleine Dayot wrote, the paintings are a “curious blend of extreme modernism and classical purity that attracts and surprises, and provokes, perhaps even before conquering completely, a sort of cerebral struggle where these very different tendencies fight with each other until the moment the gaze grasps the great harmony that reigns in these opposites” (quoted in G. Mori, Tamara de Lempicka: The Queen of Modern, Milan, 2011, p. 21). While Lempicka frequently acknowledges her indebtedness to the Italian Renaissance and how the style of the Old Masters and Italian Manneriests profoundly impacted the development of her unique artistic style, equally important to her as an artist were the aesthetic forces of her era – the cult of the machine and  the American film industry. The Machine age aesthetic with its linear qualities and smooth surfaces permeated the Western World in the nineteenth century, coating it in a metallic sheen. Borrowing from the chrome and enamel feel of the time, Lempicka’s works, with their exceptional technical quality, are rendered with imperceptible brushstrokes. Enthralled with the mystique and enamored by the modern glamour of Hollywood, it is no accident that the models in her portraits often resemble film icons from the early days of Hollywood’s golden age. With its characteristic razor-sharp draughtsmanship, theatrical lighting and sensual modeling, Les Jeunes filles demonstrates the ways in which Lempicka’s portraits are unlike those of any other artist of her day.