Tamara De Lempicka

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Tamara Lempicka (born Tamara Rozalia Gurwik-Górska; 16 May 1898 – 18 March 1980; colloquial: Tamara de Lempicka) was a Polish 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.

Born in Warsaw, Lempicka briefly moved to Saint Petersburg where she married a prominent Polish lawyer, then travelled to Paris.

She studied painting with Maurice Denis and André Lhote.

Her style was a blend of late, refined cubism and the neoclassical style, particularly inspired by the work of Jean-Dominique Ingres.

She was an active participant in the artistic and social life of Paris between the Wars.

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 lifes and, in the 1960s, some abstract paintings.

Her work was out of fashion after World War II, but made a comeback in the late 1960s, with the rediscovery of Art Deco.

She moved to Mexico in 1974, where she died in 1980.

At her request, her ashes were scattered over the Popocatépetl volcano.

Early life

She was born on 16 May 1898, in Warsaw, then part of Congress Poland of the Russian Empire. Her father was Boris Gurwik-Górski, a Russian Jewish attorney for a French trading company, and her mother was Malwina Dekler, a Polish-Jewish socialite who had lived most of her life abroad and who met her husband at one of the European spas.

Tamara was raised in Warsaw by her mother and grandparents, Bernard and Klementyna Dekler, who were members of the social and cultural elite - they were friends with Ignacy Jan Paderewski and Artur Rubinstein. Their family grave is located in the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street in Warsaw. When Tamara was ten, her mother commissioned a pastel portrait of her by a prominent local artist. She detested posing and was dissatisfied with the finished work. She took the pastels, had her younger sister pose, and made her first portrait.

In 1911 her parents 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 overturned their comfortable life. In December 1917, 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.

Personal life

Lempicka placed high value on working to produce her own fortune, famously saying, "There are no miracles, there is only what you make." She took this personal success and created a hedonistic lifestyle for herself, accompanied by intense love affairs within high society.

Her daughter Kizette rarely saw Lempicka, but was immortalized in her paintings. Lempicka painted her repeatedly, creating a striking portrait series: Kizette in Pink, 1926; Kizette on the Balcony, 1927; Kizette Sleeping, 1934; Portrait of Baroness Kizette, 1954–1955, among others. Some of Lempicka's other paintings depict women who resemble Kizette.

Lempicka was bisexual. Her affairs with both men and women were conducted in ways that were considered scandalous at the time. She often used formal and narrative elements in her portraits, and her nude studies included themes of desire and seduction. 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.

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Career

The empickis lived in Paris for a long time before deciding on family jewels for a while. Tadeusz was unemployed or unable to find suitable jobs. Maria Krystyna "Kizette" was their daughter and mother, who were born about 1919, filling their financial needs. Lempicka decided to paint at her sister's request and studied both at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts and Académie de la Grande Chaumière with Maurice Denis and then with André Lhote, who would have a greater influence on her style. Her first paintings were still lives and portraits of her daughter Kizette and her neighbor. She sold her first paintings at Galerie Colette-Weil, which enabled her to exhibit at the Salon des indépendents, the Salon d'automne, and the Salon des moins trente ans for promising young painters. For the first time in 1922, she appeared at the Salon d'automne for the first time in 1922. She named her paintings "Lempitzki" — the feminine form of her name.

Her breakthrough came in 1925, with the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, which later gave rise to the style Art Deco. She exhibited her work in two of the salon des Tuileries and the Salon des femmes peintres. Her artworks were discovered by American journalists from Harper's Bazaar and other fashion magazines, and her name was revealed. Count Emmanuele Castelbarco conducted her first big exposition in Milan, Italy, in the same year. Lempicka created 28 new works in six months for this exhibition. The Marquis Sommi Picenardi, her first love on her Italian tour, welcomed her a new one on her Italian tour. Gabriele d'Annunzio, a well-known Italian poet and playwright, was also invited to visit him. She visited him twice at his villa on Lake Garda in the hopes of painting his portrait; he, in turn, was set on seduction. She went away dissatisfied after her failed attempts to get the job, and d'Annunzio was also unsatisfied.

Lempicka's portrait of Kizette on the Balcony won her first major award at the Exposition Internationale des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, France. Another portrait of Kizette at her First Communion in 1929, won a bronze medal at the international exposition in Pozna, Poland.

In 1928, she was divorced from Tadeusz empicki. Raoul Kuffner, a baron of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and an art dealer, was among her friends that shared her name in that year. His name was not an ancient one; his family had been granted the title by Franz-Joseph I, the second-to-last Austro-Hungarian Emperor, because Kuffner's family had been the primary source of beef and beer to the imperial court. He owned properties in eastern Europe of a considerable size. Nana de Herrera, a Spanish dancer, was given the commission to paint his mistress. Lempicka completed the portrait (which was not particularly flattering to de Herrera) and took the place of de Herrera as the baron's mistress. Adrienne de Montaut, a modernist architect, and she and her own sister Adrienne de Montaut decorated an apartment on rue Méchain in Paris. René Herbst made the tables. In decoration books, the austere, functional interiors appeared.

Lempicka created Autoportrait (Tamara in a Green Bugatti) for the German fashion magazine Die Dame in 1929. This showed her at the wheel of a Bugatti racing car, wearing a leather helmet and gloves, as well as a gray scarf, a portrait of cold beauty, liberation, and inaccessibility. In truth, she did not own a Bugatti car; her own vehicle was a tiny yellow Renault, which was robbed one night while celebrating at La Rotonde in Montparnasse.

For the first time in 1929, she came to the United States to paint a portrait of American oilman Rufus T. Bush's fiancée and host a display of her work at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. Following the 1929 stock market crash, the exposition was a success, but she lost the money she earned as a result of the bank she used to fail. The portrait of Joan Jeffery, Rufus T. Bush's fiancée, was completed but it was put into storage after the couple's divorce in 1932. Following Joan's death (now Vanderpool), Christies auctioned it in 2004. During the 1930s, Lempicka's career reached a peak. King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen Elizabeth of Greece were among the subjects painted by her. Museums have begun to collect her works. In 1933, she moved to Chicago, where her photographs were on display alongside Georgia O'Keeffe, Santiago Martz Delgado, and Willem de Kooning. Despite the Great Depression, she continued to receive commissions and displayed her work in several Paris galleries.

Baron Kuffner's wife died in 1933. De Lempicka was married in Zurich on February 3rd 1934. She was alarmed by the rise of the Nazis and compelled her husband to sell the majority of his Hungary properties and move his fortune and his belongings to Switzerland.

Following the outbreak of World War II, Lempicka and her husband immigrated to the United States in 1939. They landed in Los Angeles first. The Paul Reinhard Gallery curated a show of her art, and the couple travelled to Beverly Hills, where they settled into the former home of film director King Vidor. At the Julian Levy Gallery in New York, the Courvoisier Galleries in San Francisco, and the Milwaukee Institute of Art, but her shows did not have the same success she had hoped for. In 1941, Kizette's daughter was able to flee from occupied France via Lisbon and join them in Los Angeles. Harold Foxhall, a Texas geologist, married Kizette. Baron Kuffner and De Lempicka immigrated to New York City in 1943.

She maintained a vivacious social life in the postwar years, but there were no commissions for society portraits. In the period of postwar modernism and abstract expressionism, her art deco style seemed anachronistic. She expanded her subject matter to include still life, and in 1960, she began to paint abstract works and then use a palette knife instead of her smoother earlier brushwork. She has occasionally reworked older pieces in her new style. Amethyste (1946), the crisp and precise woman with Guitar (1963), became the pink and fuzzy Girl with Guitar (1963). In May and June 1961, she had a show at the Ror Volmar Gallery in Paris, but it did not revive her earlier success.

Baron Kuffner died of a heart attack on the ocean liner Liberté in November 1961 en route to New York. Lempicka's slew of her possessions and made three around-the-world trips by sea after his death. Lempicka moved to Houston, Texas, to be with Kizette and her family, and to escape from her life as a professional artist in 1963. She began to repaint her earlier jobs. She repainted her well-known Autoportrait (1929) twice between 1974 and 1979; Autoportrait II was sold, but Autoportrait III stayed in her retirement apartments, where it would remain until her death. She created her fourth copy of her painting of St. Anthony, which was her fourth version.

She moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1974. Kizette, a widow, moved to Cuernavaca to care for de Lempicka, whose health was declining. De Lempicka died in her sleep on March 18, 1980. Her ashes were dispersed over the volcano Popocatél, according to her wishes.

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