Lempicka, Tamara de (née Gorska)

Lempicka, Tamara de (née Gorska) (c. c.1895–1980). Painter of Polish-Russian birth, active in Paris and the USA. According to here own account she was born in Warsaw in 1898, but there is evidence to indicate that her place of birth (and upbringing) was Moscow and that she deducted a few years from her age. In 1916 she married Tadeusz de Lempicki, a Russian lawyer and socialite. In 1918 they fled the Russian Revolution to Paris, where she studied with Maurice Denis and André Lhote. She quickly established a reputation as a painter of portraits, mainly of people in the smart social circles in which she moved—writers, entertainers, the dispossessed nobility of Eastern Europe (an example is her portrait of her husband, 1928, in the Pompidou Centre, Paris). Her style owes something to the ‘tubism’ of Léger, but is very distinctive in its hard, streamlined elegance and sense of chic decadence—better than anyone else she represents the Art Deco style in painting. Apart from portraits, her main subjects were hefty erotic nudes and still-lifes of calla lilies. She received considerable critical acclaim and also became a social celebrity, famed for her aloof Garboesque beauty, her parties, and her voracious sexual appetite (with women as well as men). In 1939 she moved to the USA with her second husband Baron Raoul Huffner, repeating her artistic and social success in Hollywood and New York. By the 1950s, however, her work was going out of fashion. She tried working in a different, much looser style and even painted abstracts, but her paintings in this new vein were coolly received and after 1962 she did not exhibit her work. In 1963–78 she lived in Houston, Texas, then spent the last two years of her life in Cuernavaca, Mexico. She continued to paint into her old age, often in Paris, to which she regularly returned. Interest in her began to revive in the 1970s (notably with the exhibition ‘ Tamara de Lempicka de 1925 à 1935’ at the Palais Luxembourg, Paris, in 1972) and by the 1990s she had again become something of a stylish icon, with her work fetching enormous prices in the saleroom and featuring in television advertisements as a symbol of the high life.