Tamara de Lempicka

Tamara de Lempicka – Art studies in St Petersburg; emigration to Paris

Tamara de Lempicka was born Tamara Gorska - or according to other sources in Warsaw, Maria Górska - in St Petersburg on 16 May 1898. These are not the only details of the life of the dazzling artist that are contradictory. Surprisingly little is certain about such a prominent figure of the usually well-documented 20th century. She probably had a brother and a sister and grew up in a prosperous family without economic worries, discovering her love for art on a trip with her grandmother to Italy in 1911. Following the separation of her parents, she was sent to boarding school in Lausanne, spending her holidays in St Petersburg where she attended the art academy. In 1916, she married the young Duke Tadeusz Lempicki. When he was imprisoned during the October Revolution, his wife arranged his quick release by seducing the Swedish consul. The family escaped the bloody turmoil of the Bolshevik Revolution by fleeing to Paris where Tamara not only gave birth to her daughter Kizette, but also continued her art studies. 

Breakthrough as diva and master of Art Deco

In 1925, Tamara de Lempicka took part in the famous Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels modernes, the first Art Deco exhibition in the world, to which the style owes its name. Her pictures attracted a great audience and paved the way for a very successful career as an artist. She savvily built up a network of influential friends and patrons, and had many affairs, including with the politician and poet Gabriel ‘Annunzio as well as many female partners. She earned a lot of money quickly and knew perfectly how to stage herself as a larger-than-life diva surrounded by scandals. She divorced her first husband in 1928 and in around 1934, in the shadow of the onset of National Socialism, married the widowed Hungarian aristocrat Raoul Baron Kuffner de Diószegh. She quickly recognised that her husband’s Jewish roots would be his undoing, and so urged him to sell his possessions and emigrate to the USA.

Much disputed in art history; always commercially successful

Tamara de Lempicka embodied a new type of woman who lived a self-determined and restless life and did not care for social conventions. Art history found her difficult, seeing her too embedded in commercialism. Indeed, works by Tamara de Lempicka still sell for millions today, and are so sought-after that her oeuvre is almost entirely in the hands of private collectors. Proud owners of genuine paintings by de Lempicka include celebrities such as Jack Nicholson, Madonna and Wolfgang Joop, the last of whom sold several of his pictures with great success in 2009. As the popularity of Art Deco dipped, Tamara de Lempicka’s star did also. She made attempts at a change of style in later years, but her abstract works found little resonance.

Tamara de Lempicka died on 18 March 1980 in Cuernavaca in Mexico. Her ashes were scattered over the Popocatépetl volcano.