Smitten by the artist and her hedonism, Rafaela imagines she and Lempicka will “marry.” But she soon learns that Lempicka’s avaricious sensuality precludes loyalty.
She finds herself whisked away to Lempicka’s studio, where the artist seduces her almost immediately.Īvery weaves Lempicka’s biography into the conversations Rafaela has with the artist during the long sessions when she poses, “a stupefied Ingres odalisque.” The model learns of Lempicka’s privileged youth and her determination to attain the lifestyle to which her aunt and uncle introduced her after she left Warsaw as a teenager to live with them in St. Rafaela, who grew up in the Bronx and is now making ends meet by sleeping with Spanish grandfathers, doesn’t need coaxing to get into the glamorous blonde’s green Bugatti. The first and longest part of the novel is told from Rafaela’s point of view. Here, she embellishes the details of Lempicka’s year-long affair with Rafaela Fano, the 17-year-old, dark-eyed beauty on the novel’s cover whom Lempicka painted several times after meeting her in the Bois de Boulogne, a haunt for Parisian prostitutes. As in her first novel, “The Teahouse Fire,” set in Japan in the late 19th century, Avery deftly re-creates a lost period. In a stroke of felicitous timing, this painting, “Le Reve (Rafaela sur fond vert),” graces the cover of Ellis Avery’s new novel, “The Last Nude,” a fictionalized biography of Lempicka, an artist who epitomized the Jazz Age. Her 1927 painting of a sultry Italian American prostitute sold at auction in November for a $8.48 million. Today, some of them are in the collections of Jack Nicholson and Madonna. Her bold, stylized portraits brought her notoriety and wealth. D uring the 1920s and '30s, the Polish-Russian painter Tamara de Lempicka was a sensation in Paris for her hyper-realistic art deco nudes, her Greta Garbo good looks and her scandalous bisexual liaisons.
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