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Tamara de Lempicka, The Mother Superior, 1935
Oil on canvas on cardboard, 30 × 20 cm (11 3/4 × 7 7/8 in). Musée d'arts de Nantes, France
© 2025 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC/ ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Painted during a turbulent moment in the artist's life, The Mother Superior departs from the sleek modernism of her signature style and ventures into a realm of spiritual austerity. The composition, echoing the solemn grace of Rogier van der Weyden, presents a visage of sacred sorrow—two crystalline tears suspended on the subject’s cheeks, as if time itself had paused to witness their fall. Though met with critical resistance during its exhibition in California, the painting’s deliberate anachronism is its power: a timeless icon of grief, rendered through Lempicka’s lens of stylized realism. In a body of work defined by glamour and control, The Mother Superior is a rare surrender—to feeling, to faith, to the fragile dignity of pain.
