Sotheby's to Auction Tamara de Lempicka's 'Portrait de Romana de la Salle'
Tamara de Lempicka's "Portrait de Romana de la Salle" will be auctioned at Sotheby's on November 14.
After belonging to designer Wolfgang Joop for more than two decades, Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka's "Portrait de Romana de la Salle" is heading to auction at Sotheby's. Rising to popularity within the Art Deco movement, de Lempicka is considered a pioneer for women in the world of contemporary art. Her work personified the "New Woman," a term coined in the '20s to describe those who had assumed traditionally male positions to contribute to the war effort.
She began her career by exhibiting at the Salon D'Automne in Paris in 1922 under the pseudonym T. de Lempitzky. This way, the public believed she was a male artist born in St. Petersburg and not a female artist from Warsaw. During this time, generations of women combating gender stereotypes were eager to return to Parisian art circles. Writers, artists, performers—they all tried to reflect this new flow of identity through their work. On the front lines of this effort was de Lempicka. She attended, among other things, women-only afternoon meetings held in the living room of the American poet Natalie Barney.
A work of this caliber from de Lempicka's collection is extremely rare to auction. Although her paintings date back almost a century, her work remains contemporary. "Portrait de Romana de la Salle" features the daughter of Duchess Marika de la Salle, an aristocrat who had earned her title through marriage in 1905, before divorcing and receiving a generous settlement which she used to commission many artists of her time to paint her. In 1928, the year of the painting, the artist also went through her own divorce, which allowed her to partake in an unbridled lifestyle, partaking in vivacious parties and sexual exploits with both men and women. The portrait is a perfect example of Lempicka's creative practice as it fully represents the artist's style starting from the dramatic chiaroscuro, Venus-esque posing, and glamorous female subject with bold makeup.
As Pierpaolo Piccioli said of Valentino's PPPink fashion show, "[Pink] is a color that I feel I can subvert better, because it already has a lot of meanings. It has changed over the centuries: it was the color of men's power, then it became feminine...I like to subvert the idea. Today it means different things." After almost 100 years, de Lempicka's painting remains a work in step with time.
"Portrait de Romana de la Salle" will be offered for auction at Sotheby's in New York on November 14 with an estimate of $10-15 million.
