Polish artist, Tamara de Lempicka’s provocative 1927 painting La Tunique Rose seduced bidders at a recent Sotheby’s sale of modern and Impressionist art in New York, fetching a final price of $13.4million (over R190m) and setting a new world auction record for the artist.
Lempicka’s previous record work was La Musicienne which sold for over $8m in 2018.
She spent her working life in France and the US. She is best known for her polished art deco portraits of aristocrats, and the wealthy and her highly stylised paintings of nudes, which Sotheby’s described as “a talent for portraying women in a sexualised yet empowering way”.