Tamara Lempicka (1898 Warsaw - 1980 Cuernavaca), Abstract composition in red and orange, 1950.

oil, canvas, 30.7 × 40.6 cm
Dated and signed l. d.: "1950. / LEMPICKA."

Orig.
- legacy of the artist
- private collection, Poland

The work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by Alain Blondel, an expert on Tamara Lempicka's work and author of the artist's catalog raisonné.

"All my paintings are self-portraits".
Tamara Lempicka

"Abstract painting became (...) a permanent component of Lempicka's work, showing her constant openness to new artistic inspirations. In the 1950s, the artist created a varied dialogue with the tradition of abstract painting, using complex arrangements of interpenetrating ribbons, colorful stripes, geometric forms arranged in various blanks. The co-occurrence and superimposition of patterns led to the extraction of painting plans, uncovering and obscuring stripes, modeling space with the plane of patterns. Lempicka's abstract compositions intensified and dynamized the patterns of geometric abstraction, tightly filling the plane of the canvas. The new formula of abstract painting, non-geometric, operating with contrasts, biomorphic linear structures, defined the new art on both sides of the Atlantic - the developed artistic output of Arshil Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb and Nicolas de Staël and Serge Poliakoff. For Lempicka, it became an opportunity to update the decorative aspects of her painting. Geometric blanks and interpenetrating concentric patterns made up a set of paintings that imitated decorative fabric. These works are not only independent paintings - they also served as models for modern design. The abstraction in Lempicka's work, being part of the field of modern artistic practices, became a form of exposing the careful studies of fabrics that constituted the staffage of her paintings from the 1920s, completing the consistently implemented program of synthesis of art and life." M. Lachowski, Tamara Lempicka in the circle of artistic inspiration, [in:] Tamara lempicka a art déco. Tradition and Modernity, Warsaw 2022,
"In the mid-1950s, Lempicka worked memorably on a series of paintings that were very far from what she had done before. She painted them both in New York and in Paris where she worked at 7 rue Mechain, although she spent the night at the Ritz. (...) Although the fifty or sixty non-figurative compositions she completed from the late 1940s to the early 1960s lack the restlessness of her portraits and still lifes, in them she often reduced pure, finite forms to abstraction yielding an intriguing (...) aesthetic." L. Claridge, Tamara Lempicka. Art and Scandal Warsaw 2022, pp. 324-325.