Desire in Polished Steel

Sophisticated and Icy.

Tamara de Lempicka and the Eternal Desire of Art Déco.

Tamara de Lempicka (1898–1980) endures as both a name and a myth, her biography and artistic production fusing into a singular narrative where painting becomes more than representation: it becomes affirmation, manifesto, and identity. If Art Déco signified the culmination of a decade marked by both postwar disillusion and modernist utopia, Lempicka emerged as its most uncompromising interpreter. On her canvases, femininity appears at once sculptural and enigmatic, polished into forms of sleek precision and metallic sheen, staging an image of elegance and freedom carved in desire. It is no coincidence that today her works rank among the most sought-after in the international art market, commanding prices that attest not only to their aesthetic value but also to their enduring symbolic charge.

The summer of 2025 marked a new chapter in this ongoing consecration with the sale of La Belle Rafaëla (1927), which Sotheby’s hammered down for over $10 million. Beyond the figure itself, the return of this painting to the market after four decades revealed something deeper: the persistence of Rafaëla, the artist’s lover and muse, whose presence haunts Lempicka’s oeuvre with relentless intensity. Rafaëla is more than a face; she embodies an eroticism both restrained and overt, a projection of liberated female desire made monumental on canvas. In her, Lempicka found the material for an iconography of transgression, a confession refracted into the glossy coolness of oil paint.

This interplay between intimacy and myth reaches its apex in Portrait de Marjorie Ferry (1932), the artist’s most expensive painting to date, sold at Christie’s in 2020 for more than $21 million. The English cabaret singer is transfigured into an emblem of aloof elegance: skin rendered with metallic brilliance, her features honed into a form that seems at once human and otherworldly. The gaze is magnetic yet inaccessible, a performance of modern femininity that is less portrait than icon. Commissioned by Lady Ferry herself and held in the family for generations before re-emerging on the market, the canvas demonstrates Lempicka’s ability to transform portraiture into a stylization so radical that the sitter becomes timeless, suspended between society and abstraction.

A different register surfaces in Fillette en rose (1928/30), where her daughter Kizette stares directly at the viewer. The defiant gaze, the delicate pink dress, the fashionable Mary Jane shoes all condense into a portrait that oscillates between innocence and assertion, between childlike fragility and premature self-possession. Lempicka painted Kizette repeatedly, yet each rendering became more than maternal tenderness; it was a statement of modern identity, a vision of a generation born into cosmopolitan Paris of the 1920s. When the painting sold at Christie’s in 2023 for nearly $15 million, it was recognized not merely as a family likeness but as a declaration of female agency refracted through the prism of Art Déco.

The dialogue with European tradition becomes strikingly evident in Portrait de Romana de la Salle (1928), auctioned by Sotheby’s for over $14 million. Romana, the daughter of the duchess who championed Lempicka in her early career, appears as a modern Madonna, echoing Renaissance prototypes studied during travels through Venice, Florence, and Rome. Yet this historical gravity is distilled through Lempicka’s geometric precision and lustrous finish, creating a figure poised between quattrocento devotion and modernist stylization. It is here, in this synthesis of past and present, that Lempicka’s greatness is revealed: an artist who could appropriate the genealogies of classical art only to refashion them into icons of her own time.

With La tunique rose (1927), Rafaëla returns in another guise, her body enveloped in a fabric that simultaneously conceals and reveals, both liturgical drapery and erotic veil. The flesh, almost tactile under the brush, seems modeled as if in marble. Sold in 2019 for more than $13 million, the canvas demonstrates how Lempicka repeatedly placed female desire at the very center of her practice—an audacity rare among women artists of her era. These were not passive figures, not objects of consumption, but active embodiments of subjectivity: women who looked, claimed, and resisted.

The fascination these works exert on today’s art market cannot be reduced to record-breaking prices. Rather, such values signal their cultural resonance. Lempicka’s paintings articulate a new femininity, one that is autonomous, self-possessed, and steeped in both power and allure. Her women are distant, unsmiling, withheld from possession, yet charged with erotic intensity. They are not bodies but symbols: simultaneously cold and incandescent, embodiments of a modernity that refuses to fade.

Nearly a century later, these canvases remain as magnetic as ever. Their enduring power lies in their duality: crystalline surfaces that conceal tumult beneath restraint, compositions that fuse the timelessness of Renaissance form with the fractured sensibility of the twentieth century. For collectors, critics, and institutions, to acquire or exhibit a Lempicka is to claim more than an artwork; it is to engage with a vision of femininity and modernity crystallized in oil paint, a vision that continues to resonate in the twenty-first century.

If the market crowns Tamara de Lempicka with spectacular figures, it is not because of mere rarity or fashion. It is because her paintings embody something larger: the allure of power, the assertion of freedom, the seduction of desire sculpted into form. Suspended between frost and fire, her art no longer belongs solely to its time. It has become a language of modernity itself, immutable and inexhaustible, forever situated at the intersection of desire and distance.

© Charlotte Madeleine Castelli | All rights reserved