Do you like it sophisticated, enigmatic, extraordinary, a bit frivolous and also have a strong sense for the aesthetic? Then maybe the following lady would be something for you, whom I would like to introduce to you: Tamara de Lempicka.
Exactly when she was born and how the many encounters ultimately came about that made her the famous artist she has been all her life will probably remain a secret, because the "Baroness with a brush", as she is called by many loved it mysterious. Although she always spoke of Warsaw as her native city, she most likely came from Moscow. Her wealthy family had emigrated to the Russian metropolis and lived there in a handsome city palace with many servants. Tamara had a penchant for dramatic performances from an early age. As a young girl, she travelled to Paris with her grandmother, dressed in fancy robes made by the fashion designer Paul Poiret, listened to the conversations of young art students in cafés or watched performances of the Ballet Russe. Her diabolo game in front of the gates of the casinos in Monte Carlo, which her grandmother liked to go to, but which she was too young for herself, must have been so sensational that she is said to have even received a marriage proposal as a result. When she met the dandyish lawyer Tadeusz Lempicki at a costume ball in St Petersburg in the 1910s, she was disguised as a peasant maid accompanied by a pair of live geese.
Tamara was artistically gifted from an early age. When her parents had her portrayed at the age of twelve, she was so disappointed by the painter's work that, convinced that she could do better herself, she made her first portrait, that of her sister Adrienne. The countless visits to the most famous museums in Italy with said grandmother on one of their trips together must have made a particularly great impression on her. In many of her later works, both the painting techniques and the voluptuous body forms of the nudes reflect the style of Italian Renaissance painters.
Tamara and Tadeusz married around 1915 (no one knows exactly), had a daughter (Kizette) and lived a few carefree years in St. Petersburg until the Russian Revolution forced them to flee to Paris. Suddenly destitute, the young family had no choice but to rent a shabby hotel room. While Tadeusz struggled with depression, Tamara now took her destiny into her own hands. She pawned the last pieces of jewelry she was able to salvage from Russia to pay for painting lessons at André Lhote’s famous atelier, hoping that her talent would soon be able to support the family. Little by little, the Lempickis managed to get back on their feet, also thanks to the support of Tamara's family, who had also emigrated to Paris and were soon able to regain their old prosperity thanks to good connections with a large French bank. Tamara first began to paint still lifes and portraits of her daughter Kizette, whom she always knew how to stage in new ways. She progressed so quickly that in the early 1920s she sold her first paintings through the Colette-Weil gallery and exhibited them in the famous Salon des indépendents and the Salon d'automne.
The Lempickis' marriage was now slowly falling into crisis. Tadeusz had great difficulty coping with the changed circumstances and continued to sink into lethargy, while Tamara spent the day in the artists' cafés to socialize and the night working on her paintings like a maniac. When she wasn't painting, she roamed the city's entertainment districts. But it wasn't just glamorous establishments that attracted her, every now and then you could also find her in notorious pubs, mostly in search of artistic inspiration or a new fling, because the painter wasn't always so particular about fidelity, just as little about the sex of her conquests. When Tamara liked someone, she wanted to paint them or even seduce them, because she was always magically attracted to beauty. Whenever she met such a person, she didn't hesitate and addressed them directly, whether it was a prostitute (La belle Rafaela), a policeman (Adam and Eve) or someone who was sitting in front of her at the opera (Group of Four Nudes), played no part in it.
Tamara's career continued to climb steeply. At one of her exhibitions in the Salon des Tuileries and in the Salon des femmes peintres, journalists from the famous fashion magazine Harpers Bazaar became aware of her work, which led to her further commissions (including Autoportrait - Tamara in a green Bugatti, probably the most famous of her many works) and exhibitions such as in Milan in 1925. In the Italian metropolis, she met the writer Gabriele d'Annunzio, with whom she was to maintain a complicated friendship for years. She wanted to paint him, he wanted to seduce her, but she refused because she didn't feel physically attracted to him.
In the late 1920s, Tamara and Tadeusz divorced. Although both had already distanced themselves greatly from each other, the artist never completely overcame this separation. A commissioned work in 1929 gave Tamara the opportunity to travel to the United States for the first time, where she witnessed the notorious stock market crash. Despite this global crisis, Tamara remained in demand in the 1930s and was allowed to portray the Spanish King Alfonso XIII of Spain, among others. Privately, Tamara found a new companion in the Hungarian Baron Kuffner, whom she married in 1934. When it became apparent in the late 1930s that there would be another war, the Kuffners decided to emigrate to America. There she was initially drawn to the west coast, to the glamorous Beverly Hills. Tamara tried to build on old successes and regularly invited Hollywood celebrities to extravagant parties, but interest in her art, which had not progressed stylistically from Art Deco, seemed to wane in the 1940s. From the West Coast, the Kuffners eventually moved to New York. Tamara set out to expand her repertoire, and in the 1950s she increasingly painted still lifes and abstracts, she also tried to rework older paintings of her own or create new versions of them, but nothing brought her back the old popularity of the 20s and 30s . After her husband's death in 1961, Tamara moved to Texas, where she increasingly took care of her daughter and granddaughters. She spent her remaining years in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she died in 1980. According to her last wish, her ashes were scattered around the Popocatépetl volcano.
Tamara de Lempicka was undoubtedly an exceptional woman and artist. Free of conventions and compromises, she created paintings that today reflect the spirit and aesthetics of the Art Deco of the 1920s and 1930s like no other. But art didn't stop for Tamara with painting pictures, she herself was a work of art that she created again and again. Self-presentation and hedonism have always been the driving forces in her life. She liked the role of the mysterious femme fatale and self-made woman who wanted to amaze others, be it through dramatic or scandalous performances (her parties in Paris with scantily clad ladies on whose bodies the food was arranged, were legendary) or through the many different versions of her career that she told depending on her mood. Tamara is and remains a dazzling figure, ambivalent, egotistical, aesthetic, sensual and certainly unique.
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