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"I was the first woman to
make clear paintings, and that was the origin of my success. Among a hundred
canvases, mine were always recognizable. The galleries tended to show my
pictures in the best rooms because they attracted people. My work was clear and
finished. I looked around me and could only see the total destruction of
painting. The banality in which art had sunk gave me a feeling of disgust. I
was searching for a craft that no longer existed; I worked quickly with a
delicate brush. I was in search of technique, craft, simplicity and good taste.
My goal: never copy. Create a new style, with luminous and brilliant colors,
rediscover the elegance of my models."
Tamara Łempicka (May 1898 – March 1980) was a Polish born painter who
spent her working life in France and the United States. She is best known for
her polished Art Deco portraits of aristocrats and the wealthy, and for her
highly stylized paintings of nudes. Her style was a blend of late, refined
cubism and the neoclassical style. In 1928 she became the mistress of Baron
Raoul Kuffner, a wealthy art collector from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.
After the death of his wife in 1933, the Baron married Lempicka in 1934, and
thereafter she became known in the press as "The Baroness with a
Brush".
Following the outbreak of World
War II in 1939, she and her husband moved to the United States and she painted
celebrity portraits, as well as still life’s and, in the 1960s, some abstract
paintings.
She created a hedonistic
lifestyle for herself, accompanied by intense love affairs within high society.
Famous for her libido, Lempicka was bisexual. Her affairs with both men and
women were conducted in ways that were considered scandalous at the time. In
the 1920s, she became closely associated with lesbian and bisexual women in
writing and artistic circles, among them Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West,
and Colette. She also became involved with Suzy Solidor, a nightclub singer at
the Boîte de Nuit, whose portrait she later painted.
Her father was Boris
Gurwik-Górski, a Russian Jewish attorney for a French trading company. Her
mother was Malwina Dekler, a Polish socialite who had lived most of her life
abroad and who met her husband at one of the European spas.
In 1911 she was sent her to a
boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, but she was bored and she feigned
illness to be permitted to leave the school. Instead, her grandmother took her
on a tour of Italy, where she developed her interest in art.
After her parents divorced in
1912, she chose to spend the summer with her wealthy Aunt Stefa in Saint
Petersburg. There, in 1915, she met and fell in love with a prominent Polish
lawyer, Tadeusz Łempicki (1888–1951). Her family offered him a large dowry, and
they were married in 1916 in the chapel of the Knights of Malta in St.
Petersburg.
The Russian Revolution in
November 1917, her husband Tadeusz
Łempicki was arrested in the middle of the night by the Cheka, the secret
police. Tamara searched the prisons for him, and with the help of the Swedish
consul, to whom she offered her favors, she secured his release. They traveled to Copenhagen then to London and
finally to Paris, where Tamara's family had also found refuge.
In Paris, the Łempickis lived for
a while from the sale of family jewels. Tadeusz proved unwilling or unable to
find suitable work. Their daughter, Maria Krystyna "Kizette", was
born around 1919.
Lempicka decided to become a
painter at her sister's suggestion and studied both at the Saint Petersburg
Academy of Arts and Académie de la Grande Chaumière. She exhibited at the Salon
d'automne for the first time in 1922. During this period, she signed her
paintings "Lempitzki"—the masculine form of her name.
During an Italian tour, she took
a lover, the Marquis Sommi Picenardi. In
1928 she divorced Łempicki and became
the mistress for t Raoul Kuffner, a baron of the
former Austro-Hungarian Empire and an art collector. (The title was granted by
the second-to-last Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Franz-Joseph I, because Kuffner's
family had been the supplier of beef and beer to the imperial court.) Still, Kuffner
owned properties of considerable size in eastern Europe.
She traveled to the United States
for the first time in 1929 to paint a portrait of the fiancée of the American
oilman Rufus T. Bush and to arrange a show of her work at the Carnegie
Institute in Pittsburgh. The exposition was a success, but the money she earned
was lost when the bank she used collapsed following the stock market crash of
1929.
The wife of Baron Kuffner died in
1933 and De Lempicka married him in 1934 in Zurich. She was alarmed by the rise
of the Nazis and persuaded her husband to sell most of his properties in
Hungary and to move his fortune and his belongings to Switzerland.[8]
In the winter of 1939, following
the outbreak of World War II, Lempicka and her husband moved to the United
States. They settled first in Los Angeles, and moved to Beverly Hills, settling
into the former residence of the film director King Vidor.
In 1943, Baron Kuffner and de
Lempicka relocated to New York City.
Her work was out of fashion after
World War II, but made a comeback in the late 1960s, with the rediscovery of
Art Deco.
When
her last husband, Baron Kuffner, died of a heart attack on November 1961 on the
ocean liner Liberté en route to New York, Lempicka sold many of her possessions
and made three around-the-world trips by ship.
In
1963, Lempicka moved to Houston, Texas, to be with Kizette and her family and
retired from her life as a professional artist. In 1974, she decided to move to
Cuernavaca, Mexico. After the death of her husband in 1979, Kizette moved to
Cuernavaca to take care of de Lempicka, whose health was declining. De Lempicka
died in her sleep on March 18, 1980. Following her wishes, her ashes were
scattered over the volcano Popocatépetl.