TAMARA DE LEMPICKA 1898-1980

The Lempickis then fled to Paris, France where she became known as Tamara de Lempicka.

 

Tamara de Lempicka (May 16, 1898, Warsaw, Poland - March 18, 1980 Cuernavaca, Mexico) , noted Art Deco painter, was born Maria Górska in a wealthy family in Warsaw, Poland (then in the Russian Empire). In 1912, after her parents divorced, she was sent by her grandmother to school in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 1914 she married a lawyer named Tadeusz Lempicki in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1917, during the Russian Revolution, Tadeusz was arrested by the Bolsheviks.

Although only seventeen years old, Tamara pleaded for, and finally secured, his release.

The Lempickis then fled to Paris, France where she became known as Tamara de Lempicka. She studied art and became a well-known portrait painter, developing a distinctive and bold style, sometimes referred to as soft cubism, which epitomizes the cool modernism of Art Deco.

Tamara de Lempicka was bisexual, and her affairs with both men and women were carried out in ways that were scandalous at the time. She often used formal and narrative elements in her portraits and nude studies to produce overpowering effects of desire and seduction. [1]

 

At the outset of the second World War she moved to Beverly Hills, California with her second husband, Baron Raoul Kuffner, whom she married in 1933. In 1943 they relocated to New York City where she continued to paint in her trademark style.

 

After Baron Kuffner's death from a heart attack in 1962, Tamara moved to Houston, Texas and began painting in a new style, using a palette knife rather than a brush to lay down the paint. Her new paintings were not well received, and Tamara swore that she would never exhibit her work again.

 

She later ceased painting and in 1978 she moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico. She died in her sleep on March 19, 1980 and her ashes were scattered over the volcano Popocatepetl by Count Giovanni Agusta.

 

Gallery pictures: Tamara de Lempicka - High Summer 1928, Tamara de Lempicka - Woman In Blue With Mandolin 1929, Tamara de Lempicka - Young Girl With Gloves (1929, Tamara de Lempicka - Woman in Yellow, Tamara de Lempicka - Amethyste (1946), Tamara de Lempicka - Sleeping Woman, Tamara de Lempicka - The Model 1925, Tamara de Lempicka - Self-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) 1925, Tamara de Lempicka - Portrait of Marjorie Ferry (ca. 1927), Tamara de Lempicka - The Girls, 1928, Tamara de Lempicka - The Grand Duke Gabriel, Tamara de Lempicka - Andromeda

 

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