Tamara de Lempicka

Tamara Łempicka (born Maria Górska; 16 May 1898 – 18 March 1980), also known as Tamara de Lempicka, was a Polish painter active in the 1920s and 1930s, who spent her working life in France and the United States. She is best-known for her polished Art-Deco portraits of aristocrats and the wealthy, and for her highly-stylized paintings of nudes.

Not only the most fashionable portrait painter of her generation among the haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy, Lempicka was a glamour icon in her own right. Friends with Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Greta Garbo, Lempicka became known for her distinctive painting style, which emulated the sensual side of the French Art Deco movement.

• Movements and Styles: Art Deco, Proto-Feminist Artists
• Born: May 16, 1898 - Warsaw, Poland (then Russia)
• Died: March 18, 1980 - Cuernavaca, Mexico

Kizette with her mother, Tamara de Lempicka (Bois de Boulogne, Paris 1925)

Kizette de Lempicka was born Marie-Christine de Lempicka on September 16, 1916.   Tamara often had her daughter model though did not always admit to others she had a child. Many of her friends were unaware of Kizette's existence. Tamara titled paintings of Kizette with anonymous titles such as Girl on a Balcony or First Communion. 

Baroness Kizette de Lempicka-Foxhall wrote Passion by Design: The Art and Times of Tamara de Lempicka, her memoirs of her mother in 1986.

  
Left:  Girl on a Balcony was important in Tamara de Lempicka's artistic career as it won her first major award, First Prize at the Exposition Internationale in 1927.
Right: Kizette in Pink (c.1926) Oil on canvas - Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes - France

Portrait of Dr. Boucard (1929)
Oil on canvas - Private collection

Dr. Boucard was tangentially involved in cloak-and-dagger activities during the Second World War - his racing yacht was used by the French Resistance to transport munitions and was found by the Nazis and scuttled (then later purchased by Greek tycoon, Aristotle Onassis), Boucard's claim to fame as a famous French bacteriologist - hence the test tube and the microscope - was his 1907 isolation of Lactobacillus acidophilus, which he developed into an antidiarrheal drug called Lacetol. The discovery and subsequent development of the drug made Bourcard quite wealthy; thus, he had the finances to commission multiple portraits from Lempicka. 

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Born in Warsaw, Lempicka moved to Saint Petersburg where she married a prominent Polish lawyer, then emigrated to Paris with her husband following the Russian Revolution. She studied painting with Maurice Denis and André Lhote. Her style was a blend of late, refined cubism and the neoclassical style, particularly inspired by the work of Jean-Dominique Ingres. She was an active participant in the artistic and social life of Paris between the Wars. In 1928 she became the mistress of wealthy art collector from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Baron Raoul Kuffner. After the death of his wife in 1933, the Baron married Lempicka in 1934, and thereafter she became known in the press as "The Baroness with a Brush."Following the outbreak of World War II in 1939, she and her husband moved to the United States and she painted celebrity portraits, as well as still-lifes and, in the 1960s, some abstract paintings. Her work was out of fashion after World War II, but made a comeback in the late 1960s, with the rediscovery of Art Deco. She moved to Mexico in 1974, where she died in 1980. At her request, her ashes were scattered over the Popocatapetl volcano.