Tamara de Lempicka travelled to New York in September 1929, in order to fulfil several commissions. The press was very much taken with the beautiful Polish woman's aura. Her skilful way of suggesting the aristocratic charms of the Old World high society in her art made her a manner of ambassadress of that world.

Now at the height of her career, de Lempicka moved to a new studio-apartment. Probably on the advice of her architect sister Adrienne Gorska, she chose an ultra-modern block designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens and recently built near Montparnasse, the new centre of artistic life in Paris, prompting an immediate outpouring of articles in the press. Her dazzling parties caused a sensation in Parisian high society.

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.