BOOK REVIEW: Ellis Avery's The Last Nude

Desire. When thought outside of the stultifying psychoanalytic paradigm that defines it as lack, desire can be positively conceptualized as production, a productive force that enables creation.

Art produces sensations, according to Deleuze, and I can distinctly recall the intensity of sensations I experienced when I first encountered a Tamara de Lempicka—the Autoportrait of de Lempicka herself, to be exact; the seductiveness which Ellis Avery playfully captures through her allusion to the painting in her description of Rafaela’s first meeting with Tamara (“Her bobbed hair gleamed pale beneath an exquisitely useless aviator’s hood done in putty-colored kid”), one of the first scenes of The Last Nude.

(Autoportrait, 1925)

With starred reviews from both Booklist and Library Journal, in addition to widespread praise in numerous, early reviews, Avery’s second novel, The Last Nude, depicts how desire is productive—differently productive, for different people—through the story of the love affair between the acclaimed Art Deco artist, Tamara de Lempicka and one of her models, her muse Rafaela Fano, who posed for a handful of portraits, including The Dream and, of course, Beautiful Rafaela.

(Cover: The Dream (1927) by Tamara de Lempicka. The model of the above painting also posed for de Lempicka's Beautiful Rafaela (1927).)

(Beautiful Rafaela, 1927)

Avery’s historical fiction, primarily narrated through the eyes of the naïve, American ex-pat Rafaela, paints a landscape of the 1920s Parisian scene in a similar vein to that of Margaret Vandenburg’s An American in Paris (2000), in which a young, American art journalist named Henri (Henrietta) gains access to the glorious (but vastly different!) worlds of Gertrude Stein's ateilier and Natalie Barney’s seductive salons in order to write features for Vogue magazine. If you fetishize the Sapphic Left Bank and the haute couture of the 1920s Parisian art and literary scenes, what better way to gratify your fetish and indulge your imagination than by picking this type of historical fiction? Especially, in the case of Avery's finely written book, if you’re a fan of de Lempicka’s sumptuous artwork. (A character in the book, a man who could speak for any and every admirer of her work, concisely encapsulates the idiosyncratic Art Deco style of de Lempicka’s: “I have never seen a painting so commanding, so brilliantly colored, so polished, so