Tamara De Lempicka
1898-1980 | Polish

Abstract Composition in Red and Orange

Signed “1950 Lempicka” (bottom left)
Oil on canvas

“Each of my paintings is a self-portrait.” — Tamara De Lempicka, June 5, 1936

A celebration of color and form, this painting was created by Polish-born artist Tamara De Lempicka, renowned for her works encapsulating the Art Deco movement. Entitled Abstract Composition in Red and Orange, the oil on canvas demonstrates the artist’s immense creative skill, a reminder of the visionary behind the glitz and glamour of the 1920s Parisian socialite.

Lempicka brings the warm tones of red and orange together in a harmonious abstracted composition. The tessellations of her shapes, at once organic and rectilinear, bring a sense of energy and order to the work. The geometric forms bear indelible marks of the strong influence of the Art Deco period on the artist, and her spirited palette feels vibrant and alive.

Lempicka’s life was marked by constant movement. Born in Poland at the turn of the 20th century, Lempicka was forced to flee to France in 1918 after the beginning of the Russian Revolution. During a visit to Italy in her youth, she became enraptured by the Italian Old Masters. Inspired by this formative experience, Lempicka enrolled in Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris to take up painting. She studied under famed avant-garde artists Maurice Denis and André Lhote, who introduced her to Cubism, and she began exhibiting at the Parisian salons as early as 1922. Lempicka became a fixture in Parisian high society, spending much of her time hosting wealthy elites in her atelier on Rue Méchain.

Abstract Composition in Red and Orange comes from a later period, where the artist’s style transformed from full-bodied Cubist women to non-figurative subjects. With these new compositions, Lempicka took her earlier Cubist training to new frontiers of highly refined abstraction. As the artist was executing these remarkable paintings in the early 1950s, she was constantly traveling between France, Italy, the United States, Cuba and Mexico. Never staying in one place too long, these vivacious paintings provide a glimpse into this frenetic, creative period of Lempicka’s life.

With a resurgence of appreciation for the Art Deco period, combined with the success of her retrospective at Galerie de Luxembourg in 1971, Lempicka’s work has achieved remarkable acclaim in recent decades. Much of her work resides in museums worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée des Beaux-Arts du Havre, and the National Museum Warsaw, among others. The artist smashed her auction record with a $21.1MM sale at Christie's in 2020, demonstrating the ever-growing love for her unique aesthetic style and fascinating background. Alain Blondel, the esteemed French author who compiled the artist’s catalogue raisonné, wrote fondly of her uniqueness: “Tamara de Lempicka will always continue to defy categorization. Her art and her life destiny do not fit into the usual framework for 20th-century artists. The idea that art could be a profession was foreign to Lempicka. Her life and her painting were too closely intertwined for that.”