Tamara de Lempicka Biography

Tamara de Lempicka spends her youth in Lausanne and with her relatives in St. Petersburg. In 1916 she marries the lawyer Tadeusz Lempicki in St. Petersburg. In 1918 she flees together with her husband and her family from the Russian revolution to Paris. On the one hand Lempicka looks for a lucrative activity, but on the other hand she seeks for integration into the society of Paris, for which painting or rather portraiture is supposed to give her the possibility to. Together with her sister Adrienne it comes to the first exhibition in the Salon d'Automne in the autumn of 1922. For the sake of better integration into the higher French circles she adds the French 'de' to her name. Until 1925 de Lempicka also experiments with the way of writing her signature, because she uses the male form of her name, she passes herself off as an artist. At the end of 1925 she has her first single exhibition in Milan and now appears as a woman, too. In the twenties she takes painting lessons at the Academie Chaumiere and Maurice Denis' and Andre Lhote. De Lempicka mainly devotes herself to portraiture, just a few still lifes, city landscapes or abstract compositions can be found within her oeuvre. Around 1935 the successful phase of the work of de Lempicka comes to an end. Her painting loses its metallic character and flattens formally as well as regards content. In 1939 the artist emigrates together with her second husband Baron Raoul Kuffner to the USA. At the end of the fifties she gives herself a try with abstract painting and at the beginning of the sixties with late impressionistic appearing spatula pictures, with which she remains unsuccessful however.