Tamara de Lempicka (16 May 1898 – 18 March 1980) was a
Polish Art Deco painter and "the first woman artist to be a glamour star". Influenced by
Cubism, Lempicka became the leading representative of the
Art Deco style across two continents,a favorite artist of many Hollywood stars, referred to as 'the baroness with a brush'.
She was the most fashionable portrait painter of her generation among the
haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy, painting duchesses and grand dukes and socialites. Through her network of friends, she was also able to display her paintings in the most elite salons of the era.
Lempicka was criticized as well as admired for her 'perverse Ingrism', referring to her modern restatement of the master
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, as displayed in her work
Group of Four Nudes (1925) among other studies.
Life
She was born Russia into a wealthy and prominent family. Lempicka was the daughter of Boris Gurwik-Górski, a Russian Jewish attorney for a French trading company,
[and Malwina Dekler, a Polish socialite who met him at one of the European spas.
Maria had two siblings and was the middle child. She attended a
boarding school in
Lausanne,
Switzerland, and spent the winter of 1911 with her grandmother in Italy and on the French Riviera, where she was treated to her first taste of the Great Masters of Italian painting. In 1912, her parents divorced, and Maria went to live with her rich Aunt Stefa in
St. Petersburg, Russia.
When her mother remarried, she became determined to break away to make a life of her own. In 1913, at the age of fifteen, while attending the opera, Maria spotted the man she became determined to marry. She promoted her campaign through her well-connected uncle, and in 1916 she married Tadeusz Łempicki (1888–1951) in St. Petersburg—a well-known ladies' man, gadabout, and lawyer by title, who was tempted by the significant dowry.
In 1917, during the
Russian Revolution, Tadeusz Łempicki was arrested in the dead of night by the
Bolsheviks. Maria searched the prisons for him and after several weeks, with the help of the Swedish consul, she secured his release. They traveled to
Copenhagen then to
London and finally to
Paris, to where Maria's family had also escaped.
In Paris during the
Roaring Twenties, Tamara de Lempicka became part of the
bohemian life: she knew
Pablo Picasso,
Jean Cocteau, and
André Gide. Famous for her libido, she was
bisexual. Her affairs with both men and women were conducted in ways that were considered scandalous at the time. She often used formal and narrative elements in her portraits, and her nude studies produced overpowering effects of desire and seduction.
In the 1920s she became closely associated with
lesbian and bisexual women in writing and artistic circles, such as
Violet Trefusis,
Vita Sackville-West, and
Colette. She also became involved with
Suzy Solidor, a night club singer at the
Boîte de Nuit, whose portrait she later painted.
Her husband eventually tired of their arrangement and abandoned her in 1927. They were divorced in 1931 in Paris...
