Who Was Tamara de Lempicka?
A modern artist who shook up the codes of painting
Tamara de Lempicka — born Maria Gorska — was a Polish painter born in 1898, and she was part of the art deco period. The very characteristic and recognizable style of Tamara de Lempicka mixed technical mastery and cinematographic inspirations, taking codes from artistic movements such as cubism. She liked to paint sensual female figures, certainly, but resolutely modern.
Tamara de Lempicka grew up in a wealthy environment in Warsaw. She then flew to Russia where she studied at the School of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg. There she met her future husband, Thadeus Lempicki, with whom she had a daughter, Marie-Christine, called Kizette, in 1916, and of whom she made several portraits.
But Tamara had to flee the Bolshevik revolution and ended up in exile in Paris with her family, where cousins who had preceded her in exile welcomed them. Except that her husband refused to work, and it forced Tamara to sell a large part of her possessions to be able to provide for her family. She then decided to become a professional painter, which would allow her to live and support her family until her divorce in…
