TAMARA de LEMPICKA: BIOGRAPHY

Tamara de Lempicka was born Maria Gorska in Warsaw in 1898 to wealthy upper class Polish parents. However, she spent most of her working life in France and, after the outbreak of WWII, in the USA. She is now best remembered for her stylish portraits of the rich and/or aristocratic and for her stylish nudes. The quintessential Art Deco portraitist is undoubtedly Tamara and the fashionable society of the 1920s and 30s is now perceived very largely through her eyes, wrote Edward Lucie-Smith.

In 1916, Tamara married Tadeusz Lampicki, from a wealthy Russian family, in the chapel of the Knights of Malta in Petrograd but both had to flee to Paris in 1918 following the Bolshevik revolution. There they settled for the next 20 years while Tamara studied Art with Maurice Denis and Andre Lhote and started to develop her own worldly, modish and erotic style.

In 1922, Tamara sold her first paintings and exhibited some of her work for the first time at Paris's Salon d'Automne. This was followed by a one woman show in Milan and a show at the Art Deco exhibition, held in Paris in 1925.

In 1928, Tamara and Tadeusz divorced and Tamara made her first trip to America in the company of Baron Raoul Ruffner. They married in 1933 and in 1939 settled in Los Angeles. Tamara continued to paint and slipped easily into the glamorous world of Hollywood high society.

By 1942, Ruffner tired of Hollywood and the couple moved to New York. But there Tamara's figurative paintings and experiments with abstract expressionism failed to please. Her career stalled and for many years she faded quietly into obscurity.

All was to change again in 1973 when a retrospective show of her work, held in the Galerie du Luxembourg, was a huge success and sparked renewed interest in her work. Tamara's fame restored, she moved in with her daughter in Cuernavaca in Mexico where she spent the rest of her life, reportedly marred in her last years by her irascibility, both in her dealings with her family and with the rest of the world.

Tamara died on March 18th 1980, her last wish being to have her ashes scattered over the crater of the volcano Popocatepetl.

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Artismus247

December 2018

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Lempicka. Published in 2005 by Grange Books: ISBN 1-84013-775-4. A full biography of the artist, copiously illustrated in full colour with reproductions of Tamara's best known paintings. Price £15.50 including postage. (For overseas postage, please request a quote.) Enquiries please to by email to jameskt22@aol.com. All enquiries will be acknowledged promptly.

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