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The woman in the Lempicka blue scarf is not, again, Tamara de Lempicka, though for publicity purposes, and for the generation of an icon, she may as well be.

From Paper Monument:

If you made an effort, circa 2009, to master the news about Lady Gaga, you will by now have come to regret this unwise disposal of your time. Gaga had been an American performer of some repute, a singer and dancer, and she was held for a brief time to be shaking things up, to be causing us to see things in new ways. This perception had mostly to do with her manipulation of gender signifiers, but in this what little claim she had to iconic status was derived, mostly unconsciously, from her status as an iteration of a type that had far more blazing tokens nearly a century ago. The type passes through Madonna, on whom one was probably right to expend some mental energy, and back through the great film stars Madonna so diligently imitated, and so lovingly praised in the shout-out portion of “Vogue.” And it passes on, too, to someone who was not credited in Madonna’s 1990 hit, yet whose paintings seem to have done more to concretize the figure of the modern woman to which these 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.

We are also iterations of ourselves through time: receding series, as Vladimir Nabokov (who also fled St. Petersburg in 1917) wrote of his Lucette at the moment of her drowning. And sometimes new series spin off from moments, and are taken up by others, while we come to look less like ourselves than our imitators do. Thus when Lempicka moved into double exile in America, and had her first gallery exhibit in New York in 1941, Americans were disappointed to see no signs of Sapphistry, no Art Deco pizzazz or whatever they called it, but only the faint anachronisms of a “baroness with a brush,” still lifes and portraits that called to mind Van der Weyden, Vermeer, and El Greco much more than they did the reckless years of the entre-deux-guerres. The 1944 portrait Jeune fille, in particular, is a world away from the mundanity of the 1930s nudes (some of whom are portrayed aux buildings, to use the French expression, which is to say in front of dark geometrical monoliths meant to convey the essence of Manhattan). The young girl of the 1940s is shy, inconspicuous, rustic; she fits well among the still lifes.