Tamara Lempicka (also known as Tamara de Lempicka) is having a well-deserved moment. Born in Poland in 1894, she was a painter who was famous during her lifetime for her portraits, her distinctive artistic style, and her personality.
Lempicka led a dramatic life. Born Tamara Rosa Herwitz, she had a wealthy Russian-Jewish father and Polish-Jewish mother. They were baptized by the Polish Reformed Church in 1891 and Lempicka was also baptized in 1897. She married Tadeusz Łempicki and had a daughter, Kizette. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, Tadeusz was arrested. Lempicka and Kizette fled for Paris and were able to get her husband released. He joined them in Paris. Later, Tamara told her great-granddaughter that she arrived in Paris with nothing and swore that with every painting she sold she would buy herself a diamond bracelet so that she would have a quick and portable source of income if she ever had to flee again.
Lempicka was openly bisexual and had many lovers, both male and female. She and Tadeusz divorced in 1828. In 1935, she married the Hungarian Baron Raul Kuffner. At Lempicka’s urging, they fled Europe in 1939 and moved to California.
Lempicka was very good at consciously curating an image of herself that would keep her visible and popular in well-moneyed circles and in the art world. She was famous and popular with collectors and critics alike during her lifetime. Many of her portraits were of celebrities, aristocrats, and the very rich. She also painted many portraits of her daughter and, using her lovers as models, she painted female nudes. Her most frequent model was the French poet Ira Perrot. The two women had a relationship that lasted for decades.
This article at The Collector has great details about how Lempicka had to create her own financial and critical success independently of her first husband and how deliberately she devoted herself to being defined by her art, not her position as wife and mother. This article at The Guardian discusses the art movement’s of the 1920’s and 1930’s complex and conflicted relationship with Fascism. For more about her art as well as her lovers, check out this interview with Furio Rinaldi, author of Lempicka’s biography.
After WWII, the Art Deco movement fell out of style, as did Lempicka’s work. Following the Baron’s death, she travelled around the world three times by ship and ended up living in Mexico. She died in 1980. Her last request was that her ashes be scattered over the mouth of a volcano.
Lempicka’s work regained popularity when the Art Deco movement came back into style. Madonna based some of her looks on Lempicka’s art, especially during the Blonde Ambition tour of 1990. In 2018, the musical Lempicka debuted in Massachusetts and in 2024 it spent some time on Broadway. In 2022 and 2023, the National Museum in Krakow hosted a retrospective of her work.
The de Young and Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco hosted an exhibition of Lempicka’s work through February 9, 2025. Their website has several articles about her and her work. They also have several videos about Lempicka, including this one:
All of my sources are linked within the article. I highly recommend checking out the other videos from the de Young and Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museum!