Kizette in Pink
One of the many portraits of her daughter Kizette, this painting features her dressed in whitish-pink from head to foot. She seems childish to have lost a shoe and she tries to hide her sock with her other foot. It has been suggested that Kizette's slightly awkward position may be a reference to a well-known Russian Orthodox Christian icon of the Madonna and Child, the Theotokos of Tikhvin (c. 1300). In a highly venerated painting, the infant Jesus is holding an object, probably a scroll, and crosses one leg over the other much like Kizette does in her portrait.
Lempicka was quite young when she gave birth to her daughter. A major consequence of Tamara's persistent ambivalence concerning motherhood was that in general, she had very little contact with Kizette, who lived instead with close family members and attended boarding school. The girl typically saw her mother during the holidays and, according to Lempicka's biography, the artist would sometimes pretend her daughter was her sister so she could lie about her age. When the mother and daughter did meet, Lempicka would often paint Kizette's portrait. Images of Kizette are among her most successful and possibly psychologically revealing works. Indeed, in indirectly connecting Kizette to the Christ Child from the famous icon, Lempicka positions herself as the Madonna - the ideal mother- perhaps in part to assuage her guilt at essentially abandoning her child, perhaps also as a means of communicating the involuntary nature of her motherhood.
Although this depiction of Kizette is somewhat naturalistic, the style is undoubtedly the so-called "soft Cubism" of Lempicka and Lhote. The girl, whose expression reflects none of the coquettishness of Lempicka's typical female subjects, seems to be sitting within an arrangement of shapes recalling industrial materials with waves, ships, and a city in the background - forms that evoke not only the sharp, fragmented shapes of Cubism but also the standard geometrical forms of Art Deco.
