Tamara de Lempicka

Biography

In 1929 the German fashion magazine Die Dame commissioned a cover from Tamara de Lempicka, and she painted herself at the wheel of a green racing Bugatti: leather helmet, gloves, grey scarf, cold face. She never owned a Bugatti. She drove a small yellow Renault, and one night it was stolen while its owner was out enjoying herself with friends at La Rotonde in Montparnasse.

Her date and place of birth are thoroughly tangled. For a long time she was thought to have been born on 16 May 1898 in Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire; documents found later point to 16 June 1894, and besides Warsaw her birthplace is sometimes given as St Petersburg. Her names vary too: Maria or Tamara, Gurwik-Górska or Hurwitz. Her father, Boris Gurwik-Górski, was a lawyer for a French trading company; her mother, Malwina Dekler, spent most of her life abroad.

When the girl was about ten, her mother commissioned a pastel portrait of her from a well-known Warsaw artist. She hated sitting and disliked the result, so she took the pastels, sat her younger sister down to pose and made her first portrait. In 1911 she was sent to a boarding school in Lausanne; she pretended to be ill, and instead of lessons her grandmother took her on a tour of Italy. After her parents divorced in 1912 she went to a rich aunt in St Petersburg, and there in 1915 she met the lawyer Tadeusz Łempicki and married him. In December 1917 her husband was arrested at night by the Cheka. Tamara searched the prisons for him and secured his release with the help of the Swedish consul, after which the family made its way to Paris by way of Copenhagen and London.

At first the Łempickis lived by selling family jewellery; Tadeusz found no work; a daughter, Maria Krystyna, known as Kizette, was born. On her sister’s advice Tamara decided to earn her living by painting. She studied first with Maurice Denis, the man who reminded artists that a picture is above all a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order, and then with André Lhote. Lhote taught her a softened Cubism, the kind that does not frighten the viewer and does not look out of place in a wealthy drawing room. She sold her early still lifes and portraits of her daughter through Colette Weil’s gallery, first exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1922, and at that time signed her work with the masculine form of her surname, “Lempitzki”.

The breakthrough came in 1925, when Paris held the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts that gave Art Deco its name. Journalists from Harper’s Bazaar took notice of her. That same year Count Emanuele Castelbarco organised her first large exhibition in Milan, and in six months she painted twenty-eight new pictures for it. Twice she stayed with Gabriele D’Annunzio on Lake Garda, hoping to paint his portrait, but she never got the commission.

Her chief teacher, apart from Lhote, was Ingres, above all his “The Turkish Bath”, with nude bodies filling the whole canvas. Hence “La Belle Rafaëla” (1927): smooth skin that looks almost polished, heavy red drapery, a body that seems barely to fit inside the frame. The Cubist planes usually withdraw into the background, while in front skin and satin glow. In 1927 “Kizette on the Balcony” won first prize at an international exhibition in Bordeaux, and in 1929 a portrait of her daughter in a First Communion dress took a bronze medal in Poznań. She painted her friend the French poet Ira Perrot at least eight times, and in “Portrait of Ira P.” (1931) the sitter stands in a white satin dress and a red shawl with an armful of white calla lilies. In my view her best works are just of this kind: the portrait of a particular person whose living face the armour of style barely conceals. She herself told her daughter that she had been the first woman to paint clear, finished pictures, and that this was the reason for her success.

In 1928 she divorced Łempicki. Baron Raoul Kuffner, a collector from the former Austria-Hungary, commissioned from her a portrait of his mistress, the Spanish dancer Nana de Herrera, and before long the painter had taken the model’s place. In 1929 she went to the United States for the first time to paint the fiancée of the oil man Rufus Bush and held an exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh; the money was lost along with the bank after the stock market crash. In the 1930s she painted King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen Elisabeth of Greece, and museums began to buy her pictures. On 3 February 1934 in Zurich she married Kuffner, and the newspapers called her “the baroness with a brush”.

Alarmed by Nazism, she persuaded her husband to sell his Hungarian estates, and in the winter of 1939 they left for the United States and settled in Beverly Hills, in the former house of the film director King Vidor. Her American exhibitions did not bring the success she had hoped for. From the second half of the 1930s her painting had already begun to include madonnas, women in turbans, “The Mother Superior” (1935) with a tear on her cheek, and “Escape” (1940) with its refugees. After the war her manner looked old-fashioned, and she tried Surrealism (“Surrealist Hand”, around 1947) and, from 1960, abstractions painted with a palette knife; the crisp “Amethyst” (1946) she repainted as the pink and fluffy “Girl with Guitar” (1963).

In November 1961 Kuffner died aboard the liner Liberté. Lempicka sold off most of her possessions, went round the world three times by ship, moved to Houston in 1963 to be nearer her daughter and gave up professional work. She only repainted old pictures: twice, between 1974 and 1979, she repeated the 1929 self-portrait, and her last painting was the fourth copy of “Saint Anthony”. Interest in her returned with the fashion for Art Deco, and in the summer of 1972 her retrospective at the Galerie du Luxembourg in Paris was well received by the press.

In 1974 she moved to Cuernavaca, in Mexico. She died there on 18 March 1980, and her ashes, as she had asked, were scattered over the volcano Popocatépetl.