The coda's revelations add depth and poignance, but at the price of a slow-paced, backward-looking finale that lacks the color and immediacy of the rest of the novel. The plot twists continue into a chapters-long coda in which the voice of the aged artist, nearing her death in the 1980s, takes over from the young model's in 1920s Paris. The world fell apart behind my eyelids in sheets of apricot light and pale gold hair.' As Rafaela makes the artist's career, the artist's attention gilds Rafaela with a heady blend of sophistication and renewed innocence in an expatriate community both cynical and adoring of its most gifted members.Īvery's writing style resembles de Lempicka's brushwork: meticulously observed, dramatically sensual, realistic and romantic at once. 'It was hard to speak with her thumbs upon my knees. When the magnificent and mysterious Tamara de Lempicka asks to paint her, Rafaela first treats the modeling as a job no less distasteful. She escapes a forced marriage to find that her only route to survival, sometimes, is to sell her body to men who disgust her. Who was Rafaela? The Last Nude imagines her as a seventeen-year-old Italian-American expatriate. Among the most striking was 'La Belle Rafaela,' a reclining nude with curves almost blindingly accentuated by strong light, deep shadow and a red drape.

There, after fleeing Bolshevik Russia, de Lempicka became famous for her lush, semi-cubist paintings of sultry women.

In those bohemian, nihilist years after the First World War, artists made a morality of their own out of sensuality, sensation and defiance of convention. Tamara de Lempicka, whose paintings inspired The Last Nude, lived and worked in Paris during the 1920s.

The last nude by ellis avery