Tamara de Lempicka studied at the Academy of Fine Arts (now Ilya Repin St. Petersburg State Academic Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture) where she took drawing classes.
Gallery of Tamara de Lempicka
14 Rue de la Grande Chaumière, 75006 Paris, France
Tamara de Lempicka was a student of the Académie de la Grande Chaumière where she was taught by the Nabis painter Maurice Denis and the Cubist André Lhote.
Tamara de Lempicka studied at the Academy of Fine Arts (now Ilya Repin St. Petersburg State Academic Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture) where she took drawing classes.
14 Rue de la Grande Chaumière, 75006 Paris, France
Tamara de Lempicka was a student of the Académie de la Grande Chaumière where she was taught by the Nabis painter Maurice Denis and the Cubist André Lhote.
Tamara de Lempicka was a Polish painter, influenced by Cubism. She was a representative of the Art Deco movement. She is widely known for her polished Art Deco portraits of aristocrats and the wealthy, as well as her highly stylized nude paintings.
Background
Ethnicity:
Tamara de Lempicka's father was Russian, while her mother was of Polish descent.
De Lempicka was born Maria Górska in Warsaw, Poland (then part of Russia), on May 16, 1898, to a well-off family. Her father, Boris Gurwik-Górski, served as an attorney for a French trading company, and her mother, Malwina Decler, was a socialite who had lived most of her life abroad and met her husband at one of the European spas.
Tamara and her siblings, Adrienne and Stańczyk, were raised by their mother and grandparents in Warsaw. The Deklers were part of the social and cultural elite, friends of Ignacy Jan Paderewski and Artur Rubinstein, among others. Her father left the family when she was only a few years old. Tamara de Lempicka claimed her parents got divorced, but it is believed that Borys Gorski committed suicide.
Education
Tamara de Lempicka went to boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 1911, she spent summer with her grandmother in Italy. There she was introduced to the work of the great Italian painters, that greatly influenced her life and art.
Tamara moved to Saint Petersburg to live with her relatives Stefa and Maurycy Stifer in 1911. There at the Academy of Fine Arts (now Ilya Repin St. Petersburg State Academic Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture) she took drawing classes, and greatly enjoyed social and cultural life in the evenings, going to concerts, ballet shows, and theatre performances.
Tamara de Lempicka continued to study painting at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière where she was taught by the Nabis painter Maurice Denis and the Cubist André Lhote. Both had a great influence on her style.
In 1918 de Lempicka and her husband went to Paris in order to flee the October Revolution. In Paris, the Lempickis lived for a while selling family jewels. Her husband proved unwilling or unable to find suitable work, which further fueled de Lempicka’s need to create paintings and make a living. She sold her first works through the Galerie Colette-Weil, which allowed her to exhibit at the Salon des independents, the Salon d'automne, and the Salon des moins de trente ans.
Her first paintings were mainly still lifes and portraits of her daughter and her neighbour. They combined elements from movements such as Cubism and Neoclassicism. Her breakthrough came in 1925, with the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. The same year de Lempicka held her first exhibition in Milan, Italy, which drew public attention.
Concurrently, Tamara de Lempicka started to paint nude or clothed female figures. The women she depicted had strong, luminous bodies and sensual features. De Lempicka captured the elegant, extravagant style of the 1920s so well that many socialites and famous figures commissioned portraits. The painter created many of her best-known works during this time, including The Pink Tunic in 1927 and The Green Turban in 1929. In 1929 she finished a painting called Auto-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti), for the cover of the German fashion magazine Die Dame.
She went to the United States for the first time in 1929 to paint a portrait of the fiancée of the American oilman Rufus T. Bush and to organize her solo show at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. The exposition was extremely successful, but the money she earned was lost as the bank she used collapsed following the stock market crash of 1929.
Tamara de Lempicka's career reached its peak during the 1930s. She created portraits of King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen Elizabeth of Greece. Museums and galleries began to collect her artworks. In the year 1933 she went to Chicago where her pictures were displayed alongside those of Santiago Martínez Delgado, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Willem de Kooning. In spite of the Great Depression, she continued to receive commissions and exhibited her paintings at several Paris galleries.
In the winter of 1939, after the onset of the Second World War, Lempicka and her husband went to the United States. They settled in Los Angeles. There the Paul Reinhard Gallery organized a show of her artworks. In Los Angeles, she hoped to capture the likenesses of Hollywood celebrities. Although her exhibitions were organized at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York, the Courvoisier Galleries in San Francisco, and the Milwaukee Institute of Art, her reputation was starting to wane, and demand for her services was fading.
In 1943, de Lempicka and her husband relocated to New York City. During the postwar years, she continued a reckless social life, but she had only few commissions for society portraits. Stung by the rejection, Tamara de Lempicka withdrew from the art scene and focused on her own creativity. She continued to produce works, leaving behind a legacy that defined the Art Deco movement. De Lempicka expanded her subject matter and included still lifes. In 1960 she began to paint abstract works. She had an exhibit at the Ror Volmar Gallery in Paris in May and June 1961, but it did not reach her earlier success.
After her husband died of a heart attack in 1961, de Lempicka sold many of her possessions and made three around-the-world trips by ship. In two years she moved to Houston, Texas, and retired from her life as a professional artist. During her later years, she repainted her well-known Autoportrait (1929) twice between 1974 and 1979. The last work she produced was the fourth copy of her painting of St. Anthony. In 1974 Tamara de Lempicka moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Achievements
Tamara de Lempicka was an outstanding painter of the 20th century.
In 1927 de Lempicka won her first major award, the first prize at the Exposition Internationale des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, France, for her portrait of Kizette on the Balcony. In 1929, another portrait of Kizette, at her First Communion, won a bronze medal at the international exposition in Poznań, Poland.
In July 2018, a biographical musical, Lempicka, premiered at the Williamstown Theatre Festival.
Today, her works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes in France, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., among others.
American singer Madonna is an admirer and collector of the artist's work and has lent paintings to events and museums. Madonna has featured de Lempicka's paintings in her music videos for Open Your Heart (1987), Vogue (1990) and Drowned World/Substitute for Love (1998).
Among other notable collectors of Lempicka's works are known to be actor Jack Nicholson and singer-actress Barbra Streisand.
Portrait of S.A.I. Grand Duke Gavriil Kostantinovic
The Refugees
Potrait of Arlette Boucard
Portrait of Mrs M
The Marquis D'Afflitto on a Staircase
Woman with Dove
The Peasant Girl
Saint Moritz
The Mother Superior
The pink shirt
Portrait Of Ira P
Women Bathing (detail)
The Model
Portrait Of Dr. Boucard
My Portrait (Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti)
Woman in Black Dress
Irene and Her Sister
Portrait of a Man or Mr Tadeusz de Lempicki
Sleeping Woman
Portrait of Madame M.
Calla Lillies
Surrealist Hand
Double 47
Wide Brimmed Hat
Portrait of Marquis Sommi
Still Life with Grapes
The Telephone
Portrait of the Marquis d'Afflito
Reclining Nude I
Portrait of Pierre de Montaut
Idyll
Group of Four Nudes
Portrait of Marjorie Ferry
Girl with Gloves
Portrait of Prince Eristoff
Surrealist Landscape
Young Lady with Crossed Arms
Kizette On The Balcony
Redheaded Woman Reading
Portrait of Suzy Solidor
Andromeda
Beggar with Mandolin
Key and Hand
Amethyst
Woman in a Yellow Dress
Girls
Portrait of Romana de La Salle
Woman with a Green Glove
The Communicant
not identified
The Girls
The Straw Hat
Religion
Tamara de Lempicka's father was Jewish and her mother was a follower of Roman Catholicism.
Views
Quotations:
"My goal is never to copy, but to create a new style, clear luminous colors and feel the elegance of the models."
"I live life in the margins of society, and the rules of normal society don't apply to those who live on the fringe."
"I was the first woman to paint cleanly, and that was the basis of my success. From a hundred pictures, mine will always stand out. And so the galleries began to hang my work in their best rooms, always in the middle, because my painting was attractive. It was precise. It was 'finished.'"
Interests
Travelling
Connections
When Tamara de Lempicka was 15, she attended an opera, where she met Tadeusz Lempicki, whom she determined to marry. She convinced her uncle to make the introduction and, three years later, she and Lempicki were married. Together they parented Maria Krystyna 'Kizette' Lempicka Foxhall.
During her Italian tour, she had an affair with the Marquis Sommi Picenardi. In 1928 her marriage with Tadeusz Lempicki ended in divorce. In 1933, when Raoul Kuffner's wife died, Tamara de Lempicka married him on February 3, 1934, in Zurich.
Father:
Boris Gurwik-Górski
Mother:
Malwina Decler
Spouse:
Tadeusz Lempicki
Spouse:
Raoul Kuffner
Sister:
Tamara Górska
Brother:
Stańczyk
Daughter:
Maria Krystyna 'Kizette' Łempicka Foxhall
life partner:
Sommi Picenardi
References
de Lempicka
Tamara de Lempicka (1896-1980) lived art in the fast lane. With an appetite for glamour and fame as much as Left Bank bohemianism, she fled her native Russia after the Bolshevik revolution and set about taking Paris by storm. Her prolific, monumental oeuvre remains one of the most vivid documents of 1920s Art Deco.
2017
Tamara de Lempicka: Dandy Deco
The catalogue includes a careful selection of unforgettable paintings and valuable historic photographs offering us a fascinating thematic reconstruction of the personal and professional aspects of Tamara's life, including the places she lived, her involvement in the sophisticated fashion world of the period, and her studies of the nude, as well as her still-lifes and portraits.
Tamara De Lempicka: 1898-1980
This book traces Tamara de Lempicka's idiosyncratic career, while the numerous full-color illustrations document the most important periods in her lengthy life in art.
Tamara de Lempicka: A Life of Deco and Decadence
In this first critical biography, Laura Claridge draws upon Tamara de Lempicka's exclusive access to Lempicka's family, friends, and archives to re-create the life that the painter carefully withheld even from her own daughter: the truth of her birth; her escape from Bolshevik Russia; her determination to become a New Woman; her lifelong bouts of depression; her numerous affairs with the women and men she painted, etc.
1999
Tamara de Lempicka
This catalogue is published to accompany the first exhibition in Britain dedicated to the work of Art Deco painter, Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980), held at London's Royal Academy of Arts in 2004.
