Lot 373. Tamara de Lempicka 1898 – 1980, ÉTUDE POUR FEMMES AU BAIN. Stamped T. de Lempicka (lower center). Oil on panel; 23 3/4 by 36 1/8 in; 60.2 by 91.9 cm. Painted circa 1929. Sothebys. 5/6/15. Estimate $300,000-400,000. SOLD FOR $790,000.

Provenance

Sale: Me Charbonneaux, Paris, March 20, 1988, lot 72

Sale: Vindobona, Krakow, April 24, 1990, lot 17

Private Collection, Poland Acquired from the above by 1994

Literature Alain Blondel, Tamara de Lempicka, Catalogue raisonné 1921-1979, Lausanne, 1999, no. B.121, illustrated p. 210

Catalogue Note Sensual, elegant and ultra-stylized in its presentation, Étude pour femmes au bain is a suggestive depiction of women bathing. Painted in 1929, while Tamara de Lempicka was living in Paris, this sumptuous composition exemplifies the artist’s chic and inimitable style.

Tamara de Lempicka was born in Poland and lived in St. Petersburg in her youth. In 1918 she traveled to Paris where she set about furthering her art education and cultivating a glamorous international persona. In the fall of 1920, she enrolled at the Académie Ranson in Paris under the instruction of Maurice Denis. Denis was a Nabis painter with an affinity for the Italian quattrocento and it was through him that Lempicka first acquired an appreciation for the Italian Primitives which she would later discover in person during her 1925 studies in Rome. It was in 1921, however, when Lempicka began to take lessons from André Lhote, that she learned the importance of precise draftsmanship. Lhote was a Cubist who  indomitably admired the work of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and he proved to be the young artist’s most influential teacher. Lempicka’s shared respect for the nineteenth-century artist can be found in the present work, which owes much to Ingres’ final masterpiece Le Bain Turc. Ingres’ celebrated composition of numerous nude women in a harem provided Lempicka with an archetype for how to arrange figures in intimate proximity to one another, depict female figures in various poses, and tackle multi-figure arrangements.

Lempicka first exhibited her work publically in the Salon d’Automne and Salon des Tuileries of 1922. It was through her exposure to the height of avant-garde art that abounded in Paris at this time that she derived a distinct style of painting unlike any of her male contemporaries. Impressed by the Cubists and their deconstruction of form, she applied similar techniques in her paintings; adapting them to suit her style. Loosely tied to the geometric aesthetic of Cubism and the proportionality of Neo-Classicism, Lempicka’s painting can be characterized by its razor-sharp draughtsmanship, theatrical lighting and sensual modeling. Her most striking depictions of women, including the tantalizing Étude pour femmes au bain, have come to personify the age of Art Deco.