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Tamara Łempicka

The following is largely edited from Wikipedia

"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.