Tamara de Lempicka, Young Lady with Gloves, 1927-1930, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, France. Detail.
Tamara de Lempicka, star of the Art Deco world, was described by her Hollywood clients as the “Baroness of the Brush.” If one wanted to enter the socialite circles, one needed his or her portrait made by Tamara de Lempicka.
Tamara de Lempicka was born into a well-off and prominent family. Her father was a Russian Jewish attorney and her mother a Polish socialite. She was an educated and well-traveled young lady who had seen Italian masters, the French Riviera, Swiss landscapes, and opera shows in St. Petersburg, where one day she noticed a handsome gentleman she became determined to marry. It was Tadeusz Łempicki, a lawyer and a Casanova.
In 1917, when the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in Russia, the newlywed couple moved to Copenhagen, then to London, to finally settle in Paris where de Lempicka began studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under the instruction of Nabi painter, Maurice Denis, as well as the Cubist André Lhote. Their influences, especially Cubist ones, are well evident in her bold geometric style. Her paintings are the epitome of the elegant Art Deco and the Roaring Twenties: solid volumes of idealized women against the backdrop of industrial cities or the latest technology.
Her first exhibition took place in 1925 in Milan, and two years later, she won her first major prize at the Exposition Internationale des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, France. She lived a bohemian lifestyle which at the time was considered scandalous because her life was filled with parties and lovers, both male and female, such as Gabrielle D’Annunzio, Austro-Hungarian Baron Raoul Kuffner von Diószeg, or Colette, a French writer.
At the outbreak of WWII, she moved with her second husband, the Baron von Diószeg to the United States where she became the favorite artist of the stars again. She also began decorating apartments for her New York friends. However, the advent of Abstract Expressionism halted her career and her following paintings ended up in the attic and warehouses.
DailyArt Magazine needs your support. Every contribution, however big or small, is very valuable for our future. Thanks to it, we will be able to sustain and grow the Magazine. Thank you for your help!
Magda, art historian and Italianist, she writes about art because she cannot make it herself. She loves committed and political artists like Ai Weiwei or the Futurists; like Joseph Beuys she believes that art can change us and we can change the world.
In 1998, for the first time ever, Polina Raiko (1928-2004), a 69-year-old woman who had spent almost her entire life as a wife, mother, and farmer,...
Adam Oestreich 11 December 2023
Juana Romani (née Giovanna Carolina Carlesimo) was an Italian-born French model and painter working at the turn of the 20th century. Despite...
Natalia Iacobelli 20 November 2023
The still life genre often seems less interesting than other art forms, so perhaps it is unsurprising that 18th-century French painter Anne...
Catriona Miller 4 December 2023
Latin American painters, sculptors, and printmakers were at the forefront of the aesthetic revolution that shook the 20th century. Until recently,...
Kathie Manthorne 9 October 2023
