Editing Tamara de Lempicka (section)

==Style and subjects==

Lempicka's own description of her work:<blockquote>I was the first woman to make clear paintings, and that was the origin of my success ... Among a hundred canvases, mine were always recognizable. The galleries tended to show my pictures in the best rooms, because they attracted people. My work was clear and finished. I looked around me and could only see the total destruction of painting. The banality in which art had sunk gave me a feeling of disgust. I was searching for a craft that no longer existed; I worked quickly with a delicate brush. I was in search of technique, craft, simplicity and good taste. My goal: never copy. Create a new style, with luminous and brilliant colors, rediscover the elegance of my models.{{sfnp|Néret|2016|pages=27–31}}{{sfnp | Lempicka-Foxhall | 1987 | p = 52}}</blockquote>

She was one of the best-known painters of the [[Art Deco]] style, a group which included [[Jean Dupas]], [[Diego Rivera]], [[Josep Maria Sert]], [[Louis Lozowick]], and [[Rockwell Kent]], but unlike these artists, who often painted large murals with crowds of subjects, she focused almost exclusively on portraits.

Her first teacher at the Academie Ranson in Paris was [[Maurice Denis]], who taught her according to his celebrated maxim: "Remember that a painting, before it is a war horse, a nude woman or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order". He was primarily a decorative artist, who taught her the traditional craftsmanship of painting.{{sfnp|Néret|2016|page=21}} Her other influential teacher was [[André Lhote]], who taught her to follow a softer, more refined form of [[cubism]] that did not shock the viewer or look out of place in a luxurious living room. Her cubism was far from that of [[Pablo Picasso]] or [[Georges Braque]]; for her, Picasso "embodied the novelty of destruction".{{sfnp | Lempicka-Foxhall | 1987 | p = 52}} Lempicka combined this soft cubism with a neoclassical style, inspired largely by [[Ingres]],<ref name="Phaidon Editors">{{cite book |last1=((Phaidon Editors)) |title=Great Women Artists |date=2019 |publisher=Phaidon Press |isbn=978-0714878775 |page=239}}</ref> particularly his famous ''Turkish Bath'', with its exaggerated nudes crowding the canvas. Her painting ''La Belle Rafaëlla'' was especially influenced by Ingres. Lempicka's technique, following Ingres, was clean, precise, and elegant, but at the same time charged with sensuality and a suggestion of vice.{{sfnp|Néret|2016|pages=27–31}} The cubist elements of her paintings were usually in the background, behind the Ingresque figures. The smooth skin textures and equally smooth, luminous fabrics of the clothes were the dominant elements of her paintings.{{sfnp|Néret|2016|pages=27–31}}

Known especially for her portraits of wealthy aristocrats, she also painted highly stylized nudes.{{sfnp|Weidemann|Larass|Klier|2008|p=}} The nudes are usually female, whether depicted alone or in groups; ''[[Adam and Eve (Tamara de Lempicka)|Adam and Eve]]'' (1931) features one of her few male nudes.{{sfnp|Bade|2006|p=184}} After the mid-1930s, when her Art Deco portraits had gone out of fashion and "a serious mystical crisis, combined with a deep depression during an economic recession, provoked a radical change in her work",<ref name=":0" /> she turned to painting more traditional subject matter in the same style. She painted a number of Madonnas and turbaned women inspired by Renaissance paintings, as well as mournful subjects such as ''The Mother Superior'' (1935), an image of a nun with a tear rolling down her cheek, and ''Escape'' (1940), which depicts refugees.{{sfnp|Bade|2006|pp=103–104, 113}} Of these, art historian [[Gilles Néret]] wrote, "The baroness's more 'virtuous' subjects are, it must be said, lacking in conviction when compared with the sophisticated and gallant works on which her former glory had been founded".{{sfnp|Néret| 2016| p= 71}} Lempicka introduced elements of [[Surrealism]] in paintings such as ''Surrealist Hand'' (c. 1947) and in some of her still lifes, such as ''The Key'' (1946). Between 1953 and the early 1960s, Lempicka painted hard-edged abstractions that bear a stylistic similarity to the [[Purism]] of the 1920s.{{sfnp|Bade|2006|p=119}} Her last works, painted in warm tones with a palette knife, have usually been considered her least successful.{{sfnp|Bade|2006|p=119}}{{sfnp|Néret |2016|p=71}}