Tamara de Lempicka
The portrait painter of Art Deco.
Tamara de Lempicka painted glamorous portraits with glossy, metallic forms. Her self-portrait in a green Bugatti became an icon.
Tamara de Lempicka was born in Warsaw in 1898, although she herself later liked to give other dates. She came from a wealthy family and spent part of her youth in St Petersburg. There, in 1916, she married the lawyer Tadeusz Łempicki. After the Russian Revolution the couple fled to Paris, where at first they lived in straitened circumstances.
In Paris she studied painting, among others under André Lhote, who taught her a soft, elegant version of Cubism. She quickly developed a style of her own that became one of the most characteristic of Art Deco. The figures are sculptural and glossily modelled, almost as if in metal, and fabrics fall in sharp, shining folds. The backgrounds are often skyscrapers or stylised cities.
She painted portraits of aristocrats and wealthy clients and sensual female nudes. Self-Portrait in a Green Bugatti of 1929 was made as a cover for the German women's magazine Die Dame and became a symbol of the modern, independent woman, even though in reality she did not own a green Bugatti. She openly led a glamorous life, with relationships with both men and women, and she was very conscious of her image.
Her marriage to Łempicki ended in the late 1920s. In 1934 she married Baron Raoul Kuffner, and in 1939 the couple moved to the United States. There her style fell out of fashion, and she tried abstraction without success. In the early 1970s she was rediscovered through an exhibition in Paris.
In later life she moved to Cuernavaca in Mexico, where she died in 1980. Her ashes were scattered over the volcano Popocatépetl. Today she is one of the best-known Art Deco artists, and her paintings sell for large sums and are collected by celebrities, among others.