Tamara de Lempicka painted this in 1929 for the cover of Die Dame, a German fashion magazine that wanted a picture of the independent modern woman. She painted herself, helmeted and gloved, alone at the wheel of a green Bugatti.
By then she had shown at the Salon d'Automne since 1922 and had won first prize at the international exhibition in Bordeaux in 1927. The magazine was ordering a face that already sold.
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The woman at the wheel is Lempicka herself. Everything around her is staged. She sits upright, chin lifted, hands gripping the wheel, a scarf blowing back as if the car were at full speed, and it is easy to read the picture as a portrait of the life she led.
She never owned a Bugatti. Not this one, not any. The freedom on that cover was a commission, delivered to a magazine the way she delivered portraits to her clients.
I would not call that a lie. I would call it the best piece of publicity she ever painted, and it worked so well that people still talk about the car as if it were hers.
What was Die Dame selling?
The modern woman, to women who could afford her. Die Dame was a Berlin fashion magazine published by Ullstein, the house that boasted of the highest circulation of any German luxury magazine in 1929, 50,890 copies. Its price and its publisher point to readers from the middle and upper-middle classes.
Its covers had already paired women with fast cars. Ernst Dryden, the Viennese designer who had run its art direction since 1925, drew a woman surrounded by sports cars for a 1928 cover and, in 1930, a woman with a dog in front of a Bugatti. Lempicka's cover sat in the middle of that run.
The order came through an editor. In the version usually told, she met Lempicka on holiday in Monte Carlo and asked for a self-portrait celebrating the independence of women. Lempicka's estate dates the finished cover to July 1929. A woman at the wheel needed a car that looked the part, and Lempicka's own would not have done.
What You'll Discover
What she really drove.
What is wrong with the car.
How a magazine cover became a painting.