Подпись дважды инициалами "T.L." на обороте.
Написана в июле 1927.
Выставки
Питсбург, Carnegie Institute & St. Louis, Forrest Park, Art Museum, 28th International
Exhibition of Paintings, 1929-30, № 212.
Париж, Салон независимых, 1929, № 2262.
Токио, Seibu & Osaka, Seibu, Тамара де Лемпицка, 1994
Рим, Accademia di Francia, Villa Medici & Montreal, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Тамара де Лемпицка, traeleganza etrasgressione, 1994-95, № 18, илл. в каталоге.
Нью-Йорк, Barry Friedman Ltd., Тамара де Лемпицка, 1996, № 13.
Токио, Istan Museum; Hiroshima, Museum of Art; Nagoya, Matsuzakaya Museum & Osaka, Daimaru Museum,
Тамара де Лемпицка, 1997, № 21, илл. в каталоге.
Лондон, Royal Academy, Тамара де Лемпицка, Art Deco Icon, 2004, № 21, цветная иллюстрация на обложке каталога.
Вена, Kunstforum Wien, Тамара де Лемпицка, 2006-07, № 27, цветная иллюстрация в каталоге.
Милан, Palazzo Reale, Тамара де Лемпицка, 2006, no. 27, иллюстрация в каталоге.
Рим, Complesso del Vittoriano, Тамара де Лемпицка, La regina del moderno, 2011,
№ 32, цветная иллюстрация в каталоге.
Литература:
Тамара де Лемпицка, noted photo-albums, Lempicka Archives, Хьюстон, № 51.
Arsène Alexandre, "Тамара де Лемпицка," La Renaissance de l'art français et des Industries de luxe, Paris, июль 1929, илл. стр. 333.
Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph, October 20, 1929, илл.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 27, 1929, илл.
"The Artist's Daughter," Pittsburgh Sun - Telegraph, November 13, 1929
St. Louis Globe Democrat, March 9, 1930, илл.
"Women gain notice in Carnegie exhibit," The Post Dispatch, March 16, 1930.
Marc Vaux, Fonds Lempicka, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1972, № 51.
G. Bazin & H. Itsuki, Тамара де Лемпицка. The Myth of the Portrait, Tokyo, 1980, № 40.
E. Thormann, Тамара де Лемпицка, Kunstkritik und Künstlerinnen in Paris, Berlin, № 38.
Gioa Mori, Тамара де Лемпицка, Parigi, 1920-1928, Florence, 1994, илл. стр. 140.
Alain Blondel, Lempicka, Catalogue raisonné, 1921-1979, Lausanne, 1999, B.85, цв. илл. стр. 163.
S. Penck, Тамара де Лемпицка, Munich, Berlin, London & New York, 2004, илл. стр. 49.
Patrick Bade, Лемпицка, New York, 2006, илл. стр. 63.
Alain Blondel, Тамара де Лемпицка (каталог выставки), Museo de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, 2009, илл. стр. 56.
Alain Blondel & E. Breon, Тамара де Лемпицка (каталог выставки), Токио, 2010, илл. стр. 17.
CATALOGUE NOTE
Sexy, bold and ultra-stylized in its presentation, Le rêve (Rafaëla sur fond vert) is a suggestive depiction of a femme
fatale in repose. Painted in 1927 while the artist was living in Paris, this sumptuous composition defines the artist's
chic and inimitable style. It also played a major role in establishing Lempicka's international career when it was
featured at the Carnegie International Exhibition in the United States, prompting one critic to refer to the artist as "a
modern Vigée le Brun."
Lempicka was born in Poland and lived in St. Petersburg in her youth. In 1918 she came to Paris and spent the rest
of her life cultivating a glamorous international persona. She began exhibiting her work in the Paris salons in 1922,
and through her exposure to avant-garde art, she derived a distinct style of painting that was unlike most of her male
contemporaries. Impressed by the Cubists and their deconstruction of form, she applied similar techniques in her
paintings. Although loosely tied to the geometric aesthetic of Cubism and the proportionality of neo-Classicism,
Lempicka's painting, characterized by its razor-sharp draughtsmanship, theatrical lighting and sensual modeling, was
unlike that of any artist of her day. Her striking depictions of women, including the tantalizing Le rêve (Rafaëla sur fond
vert) and La Dormeuse (fig. 1), have come to personify the age of Art Deco.
Although this picture was titled The Dream when it was first exhibited in the United States in 1929, Lempicka's own
photo-archives referred to the picture as Le rêve (Rafaëla sur fond vert). Rafaëla, the model, was a young woman
whom the artist encountered in the Bois de Boulogne, a locale notoriously frequented by prostitutes. Years later,
Lempicka would recall how she boldly propositioned this young seductress, who would become a dominant presence
in her art of the late 1920s: "Suddenly I became aware of a woman walking some distance in front of me. As she
walks, everyone coming in the opposite direction stops and looks at her. They turn their heads as she passes by. I
am curious. What is so extraordinary that they are doing this? I walk very quickly until I pass her, then I turn around
and come back down the path in the opposite direction then I see why everyone stops. She is the most beautiful
woman I have ever seen -- huge black eyes, beautiful sensuous mouth, beautiful body. I stop her and say to her
'Mademoiselle, I'm a painter and I would like you to pose for me. Would you do this?' She says 'Yes. Why not?' And
I say 'Yes come. My car is here.' I took her home in my car, we had lunch and after lunch, in my studio, I said
'undress, I want to paint you.' She undressed without any shame. I said 'Lay down on the sofa here.' She lay. Every
position was art – perfection and I started to paint her, and I painted her for over a year" (quoted in ibid.). In his
monograph on the artist, Patrick Bade refers to Lempicka's depictions of Rafaëla as "amongst the most potently erotic
works of de Lempicka in which the desire of the artist for the soft and curvaceous body of the model is palpable" (P.
Bade, op. cit., p. 59). Indeed, Lempicka's own bisexuality and her attraction to her models was an essential
component in creating her pictures.
The subject of the sleeping or recumbent nude was filled with erotic potential, as Picasso would readily acknowledge
in his sumptuous portraits of Marie-Thérèse in 1932. Lempicka's version, which preceded these pictures by nearly half
a decade, is perhaps one of the most intimate and unabashedly sensual renderings of this theme. In Le rêve (Rafaëla
sur fond vert) every curve of the figure's flesh is rendered with imperceptible brushstrokes. Her skin appears to be
incandescent as if she is bathed in silver moonlight, and her hair glows with a metallic sheen. Lempicka was receptive
to the influence of her colleagues in Weimar Germany, and she readily incorporated the hyper-realism of the Neue
Sachlichkeit into her work. But it was her love of the precision and classicism of the Italian Renaissance that had the
most profound impact on her compositions. Lempicka frequently acknowledged her indebtedness to the Italian Old



Masters and how their style profoundly impacted her art: "I discovered Italy when I was a youngster and my
grandmother took me away from the cold climate of Poland, where I was born and lived, to take me to the sunny cities
of Florence, Rome, Naples, Venice and Milan. It was under her attentive guidance that my eyes took in the treasures
of the Italian old masters, from the Quattrocento, the Renaissance" (quoted in Alain Blondel, op. cit., p. 22).
While much has been written about Lempicka's reverence for the old masters, equally important to her as an artist
were the aesthetic forces of her era, the most influential of which was the American film industry. Lempicka was
enthralled with the mystique of Hollywood, eventually moving there in the 1940s with her second husband, Baron
Kuffner. She invited film crews to her studio in Paris, where she staged grand entrances and posed for pictures with
all the theatricality and panache of a silent film star. One oft-repeated anecdote is that Lempicka was thrilled to be
mistaken once for the film actress Greta Garbo. The artist was enamoured by this type of modern glamour, and it is no
accident that the models in her portraits often resemble film icons from the early days of Hollywood. This platinum
bombshell, depicted in the nude and with brightly coloured lips and nails, calls to mind the passively seductive poses
of such 1920s and 1930s silver-screen legends as Louise Brooks (fig. 3).
As Patrick Bade explained in his monograph on the artist, "There is no doubt that de Lempicka herself was profoundly
influenced by the burgeoning art form of the cinema. In the 1920s as she formed her style, the great Hollywood
studios of M.G.M., Paramount, Columbia, Universal and R.K.O. began what has been termed the gold age of
Hollywood and their domination of world entertainment. The French and German film industries also enjoyed a golden
age of creativity, turning out many of the twentieth century's finest films in these years. The ubiquity of movies began
to influence the way people looked and behaved. De Lempicka's female subjects with their heavy makeup, perfectly
coiffed hair and their theatrical poses and facial expressions full of artificial pathos could have stepped out of the silver
screen" (P. Bade, Tamara de Lempicka, New York, 2006, p. 92).




Fig. 1
Tamara de Lempicka, La Dormeuse, 1930, oil on canvas, sold:
Sotheby's, London, June 22, 2011, lot 17, for $6,571,878
Fig. 2
Angelo Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, circa 1545,
National Gallery, London
Fig. 3
Studio portrait of Louise Brooks, late 1920s


Fig. 4
Amedeo Modigliani, Nu assis sur un divan (La belle romaine),
1917, oil on canvas, sold: Sotheby?s, New York, November 2,
2010, lot 7, $69 million
Fig. 5
Tamara de Lempicka, La Belle Rafaëla en vert, 1927, oil on
canvas, Private Collection