LLAVE | Christa Zaat

Christa Zaat



Tamara de Lempicka, born Maria Górska (Polish painter) 1898 - 1980
A Trompe-l'Œil Painting with a Botticelli, ca. 1946
oil on panel
40.5 x 30.5 cm. (15.88 x 12 in.) 
stamped T. de Lempicka (lower right)
private collection

Catalogue Note Sotheby's sale Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale, 4 February 2016, Lot 362
Trompe-l'Œil painting with a Botticelli was painted circa 1946, during a time when Tamara de Lempicka was increasingly focussing on still life as a theme of paramount importance within her work. Although the artist’s work of this period was dominated by the genre, she employed the element of trompe l’oeil only rarely, perhaps due in part to the technical complexities of executing such a highly finished and immensely detailed paint surface. Within the present work, the intricately re-created black and white reproduction of the Botticelli contrasts with the exquisite simplicity of the wooden background, bare save for a key hanging on a hook to the right of the composition. The key was a recurrent motif within Lempicka’s still lifes, perhaps signifying the artist’s search for creative and philosophical enlightenment.

The exquisitely reproduced detail at the centre of A Trompe-l'Œil painting with a Botticelli is taken from Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna of the Pomegranate (circa 1487), which resides in the collection of the Galeria Degli Uffizi in Florence. De Lempicka’s veneration for the art of the Renaissance masters was born at the age of eleven when she visited Italy with her grandmother, a trip which - her daughter, Kizette, recalled - was to exert a profound influence on the artist: ‘Madame took her protégé through every museum she could find in Florence, in Rome, in Venice, always talking, instructing, pointing out the Renaissance masters, explaining the modelling of a cheek, the foreshortening of a hand, composition, chiaroscuro, impasto. It was a trip the young girl would never forget’ (quoted in: Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Icon (exhibition catalogue), London, Royal Academy of Arts & Vienna, Kunstforum, 2004-05, p. 17). Within A Trompe-l'Œil painting with a Botticelli, Lempicka’s engagement with the creative tenets she first encountered on her childhood visit to the home of the Renaissance masters reaches a peak of technical perfection.