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Tamara de Lempicka

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Tamara de Lempicka

Artist Biography

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Tamara de Lempicka

Tamara was a Polish-born painter active in Paris and the USA. She was born in Warsaw to wealthy parents and in 1916 she married Tadeusz Lempicki, a Russian lawyer and socialite. In 1918 they fled the Russian Revolution to Paris, where she studied with Maurice Denis and Andre Lhote. She quickly established a reputation as a painter of portrait art, prints and posters, mainly of people in the smart social circles in which she moved, writers, entertainers, the deposed nobility of eastern Europe.

Her style owes something to the ‘cubism' of Leger, but is very distinctive in its hard, streamlined elegance and sense of chic decadence, better than anyone else she represents the Art Deco style of art, prints and posters. Apart from portraits, her main subjects were erotic nudes and still lifes of calla lilies. She received considerable critical acclaim and also became a social celebrity, famed for her aloof Garboesque beauty, her parties, and her love affairs.

In 1939 she moved to the USA with her second husband Baron Raoul Huffner, repeating her artistic and social success in Hollywood and New York. By the 1950s, however, her work was going out of fashion. She tried painting pictures in a different, much looser style, but these were coolly received. Interest in her earlier art, prints and posters began to revive in the 1970s and by the 1990s she had again become something of a stylish icon, with her paintings fetching huge prices in the saleroom and featuring in television advertisements as a symbol of the high life.

Tamara de Lempicka Art, Prints and Posters Collection