Update: The painting by Tamara de Lempicka, depicting her lover Rafaëla in the nude. La Belle Rafaëla (1927) sold after auctioneer Helena Newman pushed the work up to its £6m low estimate; it achieved £6.1m (£7.4m with fees), going to a buyer in the room.
Tamara de Lempicka: La Belle Rafaëla (1927) heads to auction for the first time in four decades. The painting, a full rebuke to centuries of male-dominated art, carries a $12 million estimate that may well prove conservative for this game-changing work.
While Lempicka’s sleek style became synonymous with the Jazz Age, Rafaëla transcends period categorisation. Here, the Polish painter (who fled the Russian Revolution to reinvent herself in Paris) didn’t just depict a nude—she redefined the tradition. The model believed to be Lempicka’s lover, sprawls with a self-possessed eroticism that turns Ingres’ odalisques into passive relics by comparison.
As Furio Rinaldi notes in the catalogue for Lempicka’s recent US retrospective: “These are women painted by a woman who understood both the male gaze and how to subvert it. That crimson fabric isn’t drapery—it’s a battle standard.”
The work’s DNA contains multitudes, such as the chiaroscuro of Artemisia Gentileschi, Baroque art’s significant feminist outlier, Botticelli’s Venus, but with coyness replaced by smouldering agency, Modigliani’s scandalous nudes, distilled through Lempicka’s cinematic eye. Yet, as the artist herself boasted: “Among a hundred paintings, you could recognise mine.” That signature clarity—the liquid limbs emerging from shadow, the almost surgical precision—made her work instantly identifiable in 1920s Paris.
Born Maria Górska in Warsaw (1898), Tamara de Lempicka didn’t just paint the Roaring Twenties—she embodied them. A refugee of the Russian Revolution, she reinvented herself in Paris, becoming Art Deco’s most notorious portraitist, who painted aristocrats and bohemians with equal, icy precision.
Her life was not dissimilar to her canvases—all sharp edges and scandalous curves. After fleeing Bolshevik Russia with her husband Tadeusz Łempicki (whose surname she appropriated and glamorised), she studied under Maurice Denis and André Lhote, distilling their influences into something entirely her own. By 1925, her studio on rue Méchain became a salon for Europe’s disenchanted elite, where she’d paint counts between champagne-soaked parties.
Lempicka’s genius lay in contradiction: She rendered Jazz Age decadence with Renaissance discipline, her nudes—often modelled after lovers—challenging centuries of male gaze while quoting Botticelli. “I live life in the margins of society,” she declared, “and the rules of normal society don’t apply to those who live on the fringe.”
The 1930s saw her marriage collapse and fortunes rise—she became Baroness Kuffner after wedding her patron, then fled the Nazis to Hollywood, where her portraits cemented her myth. However, postwar abstractionism sidelined her until the 1970s, when feminists reclaimed her as a pioneer of female figurative painting.
She died in 1980 in Mexico, having dictated her epitaph: “Tamara de Lempicka—artist and aristocrat.” Today, her works command millions, but her real legacy is fiercer: proof that a woman could paint the modern world on her terms—glamorous, unapologetic, and razor-sharp.
Beyond the likely fireworks, Rafaëla’s sale represents a watershed in how we value women artists who challenged tradition when the gavel falls on June 24th.