Lempicka fabricated her own biography so thoroughly that her real birth name was only recently uncovered in a Russian archive. She was born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz-Gorska in Warsaw in 1898. Her parents had converted from Judaism to Christianity in 1891. She reinvented herself continuously for the rest of her life.

In December 1917, the Cheka arrested her husband Tadeusz Lempicki in the night, suspected of connections to the Tsar's secret police. She searched the prisons for him and reportedly secured his release by offering favours to the Swedish consul. They fled through Copenhagen and London to Paris. She initially signed her paintings Lempitzky, the masculine form of the name, to be taken more seriously. Critics praised the work, thinking a man had made it.

She moved in the lesbian and bisexual salons of 1920s Paris, a circle that included Vita Sackville-West and Colette. Her female portraits carry both the painter's gaze and the lover's. Perspective (The Two Girlfriends), shown at the 1923 Salon d'Automne, was among the earliest. Her style blended a late, polished Cubism with neoclassical form, influenced by Ingres but drenched in the glamour and geometry of Art Deco.

In 1929, she painted herself for the cover of the German fashion magazine Die Dame: Autoportrait (Tamara in a Green Bugatti). The car in the painting was a Bugatti. Her actual car was a yellow Renault.

She divorced Tadeusz in 1928 and married Baron Raoul Kuffner, an Austro-Hungarian art collector. They moved to America in 1939 to escape the war. She became a favourite of the Hollywood set. After the war, her work drifted into obscurity. The Art Deco revival brought her back: a 1972 retrospective at the Galerie du Luxembourg restored her reputation. A stage play called Tamara ran in Los Angeles for eleven years, from 1984 to 1995, the longest-running play in the city's history. Madonna became a major collector. She died in 1980.