Art Deco Portrait Of A Young Woman With A Boudoir Doll, 1943, Cm 91 X 63

Art Deco Portrait of a Young Woman with a Boudoir Doll, 1943, cm 91 x 63

Signed and dated 1943, with a partially legible signature lower left, this painting combines the portrait of a young woman with a presence that is at once elegant and unsettling: a boudoir doll, one of those figures that, during the 1920s and 1930s, belonged to a new feminine world shaped by fashion, theatre and cinema. These were not ordinary toys. Women carried them with them, displayed them in bedrooms or salons, sometimes had them dressed like themselves, or wanted them to evoke an actress, a stage figure or a woman of the screen.

The sitter’s hairstyle, however, clearly belongs to the 1940s, and it is precisely this chronological shift that makes the image more subtle and more unusual. The painting does not merely record a female presence; it also preserves the memory of an earlier taste, more artificial, theatrical and ambiguous. The result is an atmosphere that may now recall certain surrealist paintings, or even the slightly disturbing mood of some Hitchcock films.

Behind these dolls lay an entire world: Parisian cabarets, cinema, fashion, immigrant artists, and Russian workshops founded by women who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution and often found work in dressmaking, decorative arts and related trades. Boudoir dolls were born at exactly this intersection of theatre and fashion, of émigré survival and a taste for play, artifice and self-staging.

Oil on cardboard, later laid down on a wooden panel for greater stability.