She had a one-woman show at the Galerie Colette Weil for the second year in sucession. The year saw some of her best portraits. She continued her liaison with baron Raoul Kuffner, whom she had met in 1927 when he had commissioned her to paint a portrait of his mistress, the dancer Nana de Herrera (cat.40).

By the late twenties, art and fashion journals had carried Lempicka's fame across the Atlantic. She was asked to come to New York to do several portraits. The year she accepted, 1929, was the fateful year when the extravagances of many a euphoric patron came to a brutal end, as did, by the same token, the creatively carefree attitude of the artists obliged to them. She nonetheless found time enough to paint several superb portraits, and to finish off several studies of skyscrapers.
For some time after returning to France, Lempicka filled the backgrounds of her new portraits of women with idealized buildings that look like dark crystal rocks, as if to conjure up the mineral outline of a future city. In the same spirit, her female models became perfect matches for their dehumanized backdrops: women whose physical appeal hides a soul of ice (see "Portrait of Marjorie Ferry" (B.166).
But it was the tenderness of her own soul that caused her distress and drove her to create a painting - the ecstasy of "Saint Teresa of Avila" (B.140) - foreshadowing a deep, and lasting, personal mystical crisis.