(Warsaw 1898–1980 Cuernavaca, Mexico)
Abstraction, circa 1960, signed in pencil, Lempicka, oil on canvas, 41 x 30 cm, framed

Certificate:
Madame Kizette de Lempicka-Foxhall, daughter of the artist, Houston, Texas, 19 November 1986 (letter available)

Provenance:
Luis G. Aragon
Private Collection, Canada

Literature:
A. Blondel, Lempicka. Catalogue Raisonné 1921–1979, Acatos Editore, 1999, no. B392 with ill.

„Lempicka’s travel frenzy may have been inspired, at least at first, by the need to escape the artistic turmoil going on in her mind at the time. Refusing to let the era get the better of her, she plunged heart and soul into abstraction. She started out with a composite style, to lend each work a theme through a few figurative elements; she then gradually allowed these to merge into the abstraction of interlacing lines. Gradually, she began producing more purely abstract compositions, punctuated by geometric forms devoid of volume. […] by the late fifties, Lempicka was again searching her way artistically. […]”
„In the late fifties, Lempicka was quite bewildered as to her painting career. She reached out in various directions, and, for a time, worked “in the manner of...” various artists. For instance, she reverted to several of her own previous still lifes, reinterpreting them in the manner of Georges Braque. She was also attracted to the elongated style characteristic of Bernard Buffet. At this stage of her development, Lempicka began working with a palette knife, discovering a taste for the paint matter itself, and for the looser contours of directly applied colors. This looked like the opening she had been waiting for, so she applied herself to this technique with uttermost diligence, producing a great number of still lifes and new versions of former compositions. However, this artist’s basically versatile nature motivated her to renew with abstraction from time to time. Thus, in the early sixties, she undertook a series of paintings obviously inspired by the abstract painter Serge Poliakoff (1900-1969).“ (www.delempicka.org)