Justin E. H. Smith reviews the exhibition Tamara de Lempicka at the Pinacotheque de Paris, on view through September 8, 2013.

Smiths writes that Lempicka's "paintings seem to have done more to concretize the figure of the modern woman to which… later pop stars would work so hard to fit themselves, the figure that always seems so modern and insolite, while remaining eternally rooted in a mythical 1925 Paris, in the moment when Tamara de Lempicka (who had fled St. Petersburg in 1917) painted it in cool neo-cubist blues: la garçonne, the female boy, artificial and contrived even grammatically, always a surprise, always as if new, even when its long chain of iterations is revealed."