Tamara de Lempicka is the perfect example of a mysterious female artist who art history seemingly missed.

Although her work defies classification, de Lempicka was the only true, traditional painter of the Art Deco movement. Everyone likes to think that they’re edgy, and de Lempicka was no exception. She was a self-proclaimed fringe dweller...despite the fame that she enjoyed during her own lifetime. She was known as the Baroness with a Brush, and her celebrity and scandalous personality were as much a part of her persona as Andy Warhol’s would be a few decades later. But sadly, she’s nowhere near as well-known as Warhol is today.

De Lempicka’s career peaked during the Roaring Twenties, which apparently were also a thing in Paris – maybe even more so than in the United States, judging by the name. The French called this decade les Années folles, or “the crazy years.” Move over, Jay Gatsby. De Lempicka’s larger-than-life persona matched the time perfectly. She was a free spirit before girls at Coachella wearing flower crowns. She enjoyed experimenting sexually and frequently painted her female lovers.

Given her track record, the woman in this painting might be one of those lovers/models. But then why does she look so sad? The woman here looks almost as lifeless as one Ingres’s porcelain-cold figures. Although de Lempicka lived her truth in the 1920s, she continued to work well into the ‘60s. In 1939, she uprooted her life to live in Los Angeles with her second husband, Baron Raoul Kuffner. Is she perhaps projecting her feelings about being in a new home? American society was more interested in her celebrity social status, rather than her artistic ability, and she stopped painting as frequently as she did in Europe.

Eventually, the Art Deco craze gave way to the eclipse known as Abstract Expressionism. Maybe de Lempicka’s woman looks so sad in this painting because she knows that her robotic features were no match for the Pollock drip. Don’t worry, though. De Lempicka’s legacy lives on with someone more appropriate than you might think. Madonna is one of her most fervent collectors, and the pop star’s $100 million art collection boasts more than a few works by de Lempicka. Madonna also owns works by Fernand Leger, one of de Lempicka’s contemporaries, and Marilyn Minter, a more recent glamorous female artist. It turns out the Material Girl has an interesting eye for art.