Tamara de Lempicka 1898-1980

By Analia Kaufman

Tamara de Lempicka, Group of Four Nudes, 1925, Oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, Nantes, France. 

Tamara de Lempicka, "The Baroness with a Brush", was born on the 16th of May 1898 in Warsaw, Poland. Poland at this time was part of Congress Poland of the Russian Empire. Her father was a Russian Jewish trading attorney while her mother was a Polish Jewish socialite. Raised mostly by her mother and grandparents, Tamara grew up as part of the social and cultural elite. 

At age ten, Tamara’s mother commissioned a pastel portrait of her, but Tamara was so unhappy with the result that she took the pastels and, using her younger sister Adrienne as her model, created her first portrait. At thirteen, her parents sent her to boarding school in Laussane, but Tamara faked an illness to leave, instead going on a tour of Italy with her grandmother. The following summer, she went to Saint Petersburg, and it was there she fell in love with her soon-to-be husband three years later. He was a prominent Polish lawyer, and they were married in 1916. 

However, in 1917, the Russian Revolution destroyed their luxurious life. Tamara’s husband was arrested by the Cheka in the middle of the night, and after combing the prisons and with the help of the Swedish consul to whom she offered ‘favours’, Tamara managed to secure his release and they fled to Paris to join the rest of Tamara’s family. 

Once in Paris, the family subsisted off the sale of family jewels, but the money quickly ran out. Between the birth of her daughter in 1919 and her husband’s inability (or unwillingness) to find work, Tamara decided to begin painting, and studied at Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Her first paintings–mostly still-life and portraits–she sold through a gallery and signed with the name Lempitzki- the masculine form of Lempicka. 

In 1925, at an exhibition with the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in the female art section, her works were noticed by editors from Harper’s Bazaar along with other fashion magazines, and her name became widely known almost overnight. Her style began reflecting that of the Art Deco style, and that same year, she had a major exhibition in Milan, and went on an Italian tour. Two years later, she won first prize at the Exposition Internationale des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, France. A year after that, she divorced her husband and began an affair with the still-married Baron Raoul Kuffner. 

Tamara shot to socialite-levels of fame quickly. The interior of her home appeared in decoration and design magazines, and one of her best-known art deco works Autoportrait (Tamara in a Green Bugatti) was done for the cover of the fashion magazine Die Dame and showed herself as an independent, wealthy, beautiful, but entirely inaccessible star. In the 30s she not only secured the title of Baroness when Raoul’s wife died, but her career blossomed even further, painting portraits of King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen Elizabeth of Greece. Her work began being collected by museums, and her and her husband moved to LA and then Beverley Hills, where her career began to go downhill. Though she still had a dazzling social life, her shows were not received as well. The art deco style for which she was so well known began to look anachronistic and out of date. She began doing still-life once more, and even repainted some of her older works, but it did little to revive her career. After her husband’s death in 1961, Tamara sold almost all her possessions and made three round-the-world trips by ship. After that, she moved to Houston, Texas to be with her daughter and gave up professional painting entirely. In 1974, for unclear reasons, Tamara moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she died six years later. Her ashes were scattered over the volcano Popocatépetl, as she had wished. 

One of the best-known Art Deco artists, a retrospective of her work was held at the Luxembourg Gallery in 1972. A play was named after her, Tamara, which became the longest running play in LA. It was also produced in Toronto and New York City. Kara Wilson acted as Tamara in the one-woman play Deco Diva based on her life. Ellis Avery’s novel The Last Nude is a fictionalized account of her life. 

Bibliography: 

Blondel, Alain; Brugger, Ingried & Gronberg, Tag (2004). Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco  

Icon. Royal Academy of Arts. 

Claridge, Laura P. & Lempicka, Tamara de (1999). Tamara de Lempicka: A Life of Deco and  

Decadence. Clarkson Potter. pp. 15, 377. 

Commire, Anne, ed. (2002). "Lempicka, Tamara de (1898–1980)". Women in World History:  

A Biographical Encyclopedia. 

Weidemann, Christiane; Larass, Petra & Klier, Melanie (2008). 50 Women Artists You Should  

Know. Prestel. https://www.delempicka.org/