Those eyes, those lips, that hair! Tamara de Lempicka captured the imagination with these trademark features in her distinctive paintings of Parisian glitterati in the 1920s and 1930s. Her combination of sensuously modeled, rounded forms with machine-age architectural shapes in society portraits propelled her to acclaim as the definitive Parisian art deco painter. An escapee from Bolshevik Russia, she studied with Maurice Denis and Andre Lhote in Paris, quickly fusing synthetic neo-cubism with influences from sixteenth-century Italian classicism. A 1925 exhibit in Milan thrust her into high society there and in Paris, where she worked from eight until five, doing three sittings daily and painting most of her great portraits in three weeks or less, aided by her perceptive psychological analysis of her subjects. Commentaries by Alain Blondel, Ingried Brugger, and Tag Gronberg complement the many photos and luscious full-color reproductions that give "gorgeous" new meaning and make this a must-have art book for strong twentieth-century and women's art collections. Whitney Scott
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