Tamara de Lempicka was born Tamara Rosalia Gurwik-Górska in Warsaw, probably in 1898 (the exact year is disputed; Lempicka herself gave several different dates across her life). Her family was wealthy bourgeois Polish-Jewish, with roots in both Warsaw and St Petersburg. She married a Polish lawyer, Tadeusz Łempicki, in St Petersburg in 1916. The Bolshevik Revolution caught them there in October 1917.

Tadeusz was arrested by the Cheka in early 1918. Tamara secured his release by sleeping with a Swedish consul who had connections to the Bolshevik authorities. The couple escaped to Copenhagen, then to London, then to Paris by spring 1918. They were among the early waves of White Russian émigrés who would reshape Paris society in the 1920s.

Paris

By 1920 the Lempickis were broke. Tamara had brought no money from Russia, and Tadeusz could not find legal work in Paris. She had no professional training. She decided to support the family by painting.

She enrolled briefly at the Académie Ranson and studied with Maurice Denis, then transferred to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in 1922 and studied with André Lhote. Lhote, who was teaching a kind of decorative Cubism, taught her the structural method that would underlie all her mature work: bodies built from geometric forms, sharply outlined, modelled with strong directional light. She would credit Lhote, throughout her life, as the only teacher who had taught her anything she could use.

By 1923 she was exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne. Her first major sale (a portrait of Ira Perrot, a society neighbour) was in 1924. By 1925 she was painting the people who could afford to commission her: Polish émigré aristocrats, French industrialists, occasional foreign nobles passing through Paris. Her prices rose quickly through the late 1920s. She was one of the highest-paid female portraitists of the decade.

The Style

The Lempicka manner combined several sources that should not have fit together. From Lhote: the structural Cubism, the simplification of bodies into faceted geometric forms. From Italian Mannerism (which she had studied during a year-long visit to Italy in 1926): the elongated necks, the long fingers, the slightly artificial proportions, the heavy modelling of single figures against backgrounds reduced to architecture or sky. From Art Deco design (which was reaching its peak in Paris during her formative years): the highly polished surfaces, the bold colour blocking, the sense that the painted figure was a designed object.

The combination was hers alone. Other artists had used pieces of it (Lhote himself was working a Cubist idiom; Italian Novecento painters were quoting Mannerism), but no one else produced the specific Lempicka effect: a portrait that looked like a piece of Art Deco metalwork, with the sitter cast in some unbreakable polished material.

The Bugatti

The 1929 self-portrait Tamara in the Green Bugatti is the painting that defined her public image. It shows her at the wheel of a green sports car, wearing a leather helmet and grey gloves, the background a vertical strip of grey sky and skyscrapers. She did not actually own a Bugatti. She drove a small yellow Renault. The picture was commissioned by Die Dame, a German fashion magazine, for a cover image. The Bugatti was an invention to suit the magazine.

The painting became Lempicka's icon. It captures, in a single image, what she sold to her clients: a woman in control of speed, of modernity, of self-presentation, painted in the same hard-edged style that defined the architecture of the period. The cover was published in July 1929, three months before the Wall Street crash.

The Marriage

The Lempicki marriage did not survive Paris success. Tadeusz had never recovered psychologically from the Russian imprisonment and the loss of his Polish legal career. He drank heavily. Tamara had affairs throughout the 1920s, including with the German-Austrian Baron Raoul Kuffner, who was one of her major patrons.

The couple divorced in 1928. Tamara took their daughter Kizette and continued painting. Tadeusz returned to Poland and died there in 1939, shortly before the German invasion. Tamara married Baron Kuffner in 1934 and became Baroness Kuffner. The marriage was financially comfortable and largely affectionate; Kuffner died in 1962 and Tamara never remarried.

The 1930s

The Depression hit her commercial practice hard. The wealthy clients who had been commissioning portraits in 1929 had less money in 1932. Lempicka adjusted by lowering her prices, taking smaller commissions, and (for the first time) painting non-commissioned subjects: female nudes, still lifes, religious scenes.

By the late 1930s, she had moved to a more sober palette, less polished surfaces, and more conventional compositions. The change has been read as a response to the rise of Socialist Realism in Europe, but it was probably just a market adjustment. The hard-edged Art Deco manner had gone out of fashion. The portrait clients who remained wanted softer, more flattering work.

The Lempickis left Paris in 1939, as Europe slid toward war. The Baron's properties in Hungary had been seized by the Hungarian government in 1939, and the family had to abandon them. They sailed to New York in early 1940 and then to Hollywood, where they bought a small house. Lempicka tried to establish a portrait practice in Los Angeles. The American market for European Art Deco portraiture was small and provincial. The practice did not really work.

The Long Decline

Lempicka spent the next two decades attempting to relaunch her career, with limited success. She had exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, and (occasionally) Paris through the 1940s and 1950s, but the reception was tepid. The Art Deco style she had defined twenty years earlier had become deeply unfashionable. The art world was dominated by Abstract Expressionism, and Lempicka's polished figurative work was treated as a relic.

She continued painting. The work from the 1950s and 1960s is mostly small still lifes, portraits of friends, and occasional religious subjects (she had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1934). The technique was still excellent. The subjects were diminished. She was painting what she could find to paint rather than what she had once chosen.

Cuernavaca

In 1974, Tamara left Houston (where she had been living with Kizette and Kizette's husband) and moved to Cuernavaca in Mexico. She had been there several times on holiday and decided she preferred the climate. She bought a house called Tres Bambúes and lived there until her death.

The last years were quiet. She painted little. She was visited by Kizette and by a few friends. She continued to receive small commissions from local Mexican families. Her international reputation was at its lowest point since the 1920s.

She died on 18 March 1980, aged eighty-one or eighty-two. Her ashes were scattered over the crater of the Popocatépetl volcano, according to her wishes.

The Recovery

The reappraisal began in the late 1970s, even before her death. The Centre Pompidou's 1972 exhibition Les Années 25 (a celebration of the 1925 Paris Exposition that had given Art Deco its name) had included several Lempicka portraits and reintroduced her to French audiences. The 1980 Lucie Smith retrospective in Paris, shortly after her death, made her standing as the central Art Deco portraitist of the 1920s explicit.

By the 1990s, her prices were rising sharply at auction. The Green Bugatti self-portrait sold at Sotheby's in 2009 for $6.1 million. The 1929 portrait of Marjorie Ferry sold for $20.5 million in 2020. Madonna had become an early major Lempicka collector in the 1980s. Other celebrities (Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand) followed.

The painter who had been famous in 1929, forgotten in 1959, and dead in obscurity in 1980 became, by 2010, the most commercially successful female Art Deco artist on the market. The aristocracy she had painted in the 1920s had been displaced by the global financial elite. The new clients still wanted what her old clients had wanted: a portrait that looked like a piece of polished, unbreakable design.