Art Deco by Tamara de Lempicka

Tamara de Lempicka (1898 – 1980), maiden name: Maria Gorska was the most fashionable and glamour Art Deco portrait painter of her generation. She was born into a wealthy family, her mother was a Polish socialite and her father Jewish with Russian ancestry. She grew up in partitioned Poland, was educated in Switzerland. Her first contact with art was in winter of 1911 in Italy while visiting her grandmother. A year later her parents separated and Maria went to live with her Aunt in St. Petersburg, Russia, where she met her future husband Tadeusz Lempicki. In 1917, during the Russian Revolution, she managed a release of Tadeusz who was arrested and prisoned by the Bolsheviks. They traveled to Copenhagen, London and Paris, where her family had also escaped.

 

The new start in Paris was not easy, the money was short, child was born, so she took painting lessons, changed her name to Tamara de Lempicka and soon became well known fashionable portrait painter. With fame and fortune de Lempicka began to change her lifestyle, she divorced Tadeusz and met Baron Raoul Kuffner, an Austro-Hungarian royal who collected her paintings. They married and as the Second World War was due to begin both moved to Los Angeles where Tamara continued painting. She sponsored her own solo exhibitions, became friends with Hollywood stars and was nicknamed: “The Baroness with a Brush.” In 1943 both moved to New York and Tamara stopped painting and disappeared from the art world. 20 years later she tried again venturing into abstract art, but with no success and her husband’s sudden death, de Lempicka gave up on painting and moved to Houston, Texas to live near her daughter, who moved there in 1941.

De Lempicka art enjoyed a renaissance in the 1970s and her art was rediscovered by the art world, but she moved one more time to Cuernavaca, Mexico and died in her sleep in 1980. Her wish to be cremated and to spread her ashes on the top of the volcano Popocatepetl was fulfilled.

Her style was influenced by avant-garde art movement referred as soft cubism. Her technique was novel, precise, symmetrical and elegant. After her death her work experienced an enormous surge in popularity in 1990s. Famous collectors of her work are: Madonna, Jack Nicholson and Barbara Streisand,.. (In 1994, Barbara Streisand sold the artist's Adam and Eve for $1.8 million, a painting she had purchased in 1984 for $135,000.)

Sources:

“Tamara Łempicka” Malarze.com, website, http://malarze.com/plartysta.php?id=134&biografia=f, "Artist: Tamara de Lempicka," SOHO Art website,http://www.soho-art.com,"Bio: Tamara de Lempicka," CGFA: A Virtual Art Musuem
website,http://cgfa.sunsite.dk , "Tamara de Lempicka (1898 - 1980)," Good Art website,http://www.goodart.org , "Tamara de Lempicka: Biography, History," Art City website,http://www.artcity.com