Tamara de Lempicka (May 16, 1898 ¨C March 18, 1980), a Polish Art Deco
painter, was born Maria G¨®rska in Warsaw, Poland.
Born into a wealthy and prominent family, her father was a Polish lawyer,
her mother, the former Malvina Decler, a Polish socialite. Maria was the
middle child with two siblings. She attended boarding school in Lausanne,
Switzerland, and spent the winter of 1911 with her grandmother in Italy and
the French Riviera, where she was treated to her first taste of the Great
Masters of Italian painting. In 1912, her parents divorced and Maria went to
live with her wealthy Aunt Stefa in St. Petersberg, Russia. When her mother
remarried, she became determined to break away to a life of her own. In
1913, at the age of fifteen, while attending the opera, Maria spotted the
man she became determined to marry. She promoted her campaign through her
well-connected uncle and in 1916 she married Tadeusz empicki in St.
Petersburg; a well-known ladies man, gadabout, and lawyer by title, who was
tempted by the significant dowry.
In 1917, during the Russian Revolution, Tadeusz was arrested in the dead of
night by the Bolsheviks. Maria searched the prisons for him and after
several weeks, with the help of the Swedish consul, she secured his release.
They traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark then London, England and finally to
Paris, France to where Maria's family had also escaped, along with numerous
upper-class Russian refugees.
In Paris, the Lempickas lived for a while from the sale of family jewels.
Tadeusz proved unwilling or unable to find suitable work, which added to the
domestic strain, and she gave birth to Kizette de Lempicka.
Her distinctive and bold artistic style developed quickly (influenced by
what Lhote sometimes referred to as "soft cubism" and by Denis' "synthetic
cubism") and epitomized the cool yet sensual side of the Art Deco movement.
For her, Picasso "embodied the novelty of destruction". She thought that
many of the Impressionists drew badly and employed "dirty" colors. De
Lempicka technique would be novel, clean, precise, and elegant.
For her first major show, in Milan, Italy in 1925, under the sponsorship of
Count Emmanuele Castelbarco, de Lempicka painted 28 new works in six months.
She was soon the most fashionable portrait painter of her generation among
the haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy, painting duchesses and grand dukes
and socialites. Through her network of friends, she was able to display her
paintings in the most elite salons of the era. De Lempicka was criticized
and admired for her 'perverse Ingrism', referring to her modern restatement
of the master Ingres, as displayed in her work Group of Four Nudes, 1925. A
portrait might take three weeks of work, allowing for the nuisance of
dealing with a cranky sitter; by 1927-8 de Lempicka could charge 50,000
French francs per portrait (a sum equal to about US$2,000 then¡ªperhaps ten
times as much today). Through Castelbarco she was introduced to Italy's
great man of letters and notorious lover, Gabriele d'Annunzio. She visited
the poet twice at his Lake Garda villa, seeking to paint his portrait; he in
turn was set on seduction. After these attempts to secure the commission,
she left angered while both she and d'Annunzio remained unsatisfied.
In 1929, she painted her iconic work Auto-Portrait (Tamara in the Green
Bugatti) for the cover of the German fashion magazine Die Dame. As summed up
by the magazine Auto-Journal in 1974, "the self-portrait of Tamara de
Lempicka is a real image of the independent woman who asserts herself. Her
hands are gloved, she is helmeted, and inaccessible; a cold and disturbing
beauty pierces a formidable being--this woman is free!" De Lempicka won her
first major award in 1927, first prize at the Exposition Internationale de
Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, France for her portrait of Kizette on the Balcony.
During the Roaring 20s Paris, Tamara de Lempicka was part of the bohemian
life: she knew Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Andr¨¦ Gide. Famous for her
libido, she 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. In the 1920s she became
closely associated with lesbian and bisexual women in writing and artistic
circles, such as Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West, and Colette. She also
became involved with Suzy Solidor, a night club singer at Bo?te de Nuit,
whom she later painted. Her husband eventually tired of their arrangement;
he abandoned her in 1927, and they were divorced in 1928.
Obsessed with her work and her social life, de Lempicka neglected more than
her husband; she rarely saw her daughter. When Kizette was not away at
boarding school (France or England), the girl was often with her grandmother
Malvina. When de Lempicka informed her mother and daughter that she would
not be returning from America for Christmas in 1929, Malvina was so angry
that she burned de Lempicka's enormous collection of designer hats; Kizette
watched them burn, one by one.
Kizette was neglected, but also immortalized. De Lempicka painted her only
child repeatedly, leaving a striking portrait series: Kizette in Pink, 1926;
Kizette on the Balcony, 1927; Kizette Sleeping, 1934; Portrait of Baroness
Kizette, 1954-5, etc. In other paintings, the women depicted tend to
resemble Kizette.
In 1928, her long time patron the Baron Raoul Kuffner visited her studio and
commissioned her to paint his mistress. De Lempicka finished the portrait,
then took the mistress' place in the Baron's life. She travelled to the
United States for the first time in 1929, to paint a commissioned portrait
for Rufus Bush and to arrange a show of her work at the Carnegie Institute
in Pittsburgh. The show went well but the money she earned was lost when the
bank she used collapsed following the Crash of 29.
De Lempicka continued both her heavy workload and her frenetic social life
through the next decade. The Great Depression had little effect on her; in
the early 1930s she was painting King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen
Elizabeth of Greece. Museums began to collect her works. In 1933 she
traveled to Chicago where she worked with Georgia O'Keeffe, Santiago
Mart¨ªnez Delgado and Willem de Kooning. Her social position was cemented
when she married her lover, Baron Kuffner, in 1933 (his wife had died the
year before). The Baron took her out of her quasi-bohemian life and finally
secured her place in high society again, with a title to boot. She repaid
him by convincing him to sell many of his estates in Eastern Europe and move
his money to Switzerland. She saw the coming of World War II from a long way
off, much sooner than most of her contemporaries. She did make a few
concessions to the changing times as the decade passed; her art featured a
few refugees and common people, and even a Christian saint or two, as well
as the usual aristocrats and cold nudes. |
|