Yesterday, Today, Tamara

The life and continuing times of art deco phenom Tamara de Lempicka
by Joie de Vivre

She was beautiful, talented, passionate.  Her paintings have been collected by Madonna, Barbra Streisand and Jack Nicholson.  And a ground-breaking play with an unprecedented 10 year Hollywood run was named after her.

Any idea who I'm talking about?

-- Tamara de Lempicka, the darling of Paris' art deco scene in the late 1920's.

[excerpted & edited from Wikipedia:]
Born into a wealthy and prominent family, her father was Boris Gurwik-Górski, a Polish lawyer, and her mother, the former Malvina Decler, a Polish socialite. Maria was the middle child with two siblings. She attended boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, and spent the winter of 1911 with her grandmother in Italy and on the French Riviera, where she was treated to her first taste of the Great Masters of Italian painting.

Tamara painting her husband,
Tadeusz Łempicki, 1928 

In 1912, her parents divorced and Maria went to live with her wealthy Aunt Stefa in St. Petersburg, Russia. When her mother remarried, she became determined to break away to a life of her own. In 1913, at the age of fifteen, while attending the opera, Maria spotted the man she became determined to marry. She promoted her campaign through her well-connected uncle and in 1916 she married Tadeusz Łempicki (1888–1951) in St. Petersburg—a well-known ladies' man, gadabout, and lawyer by title, who was tempted by the significant dowry.

In 1917, during the Russian Revolution, Tadeusz was arrested in the dead of night by the Bolsheviks. Maria searched the prisons for him and after several weeks, with the help of the Swedish consul, she secured his release. They traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark then London, England and finally to Paris, France to where Maria's family had also escaped, along with numerous upper-class Russian refugees.  It was there in Paris that her art career burgeoned.

Her distinctive and bold artistic style developed quickly and epitomized the cool yet sensual side of the Art Deco movement.  She was soon the most fashionable portrait painter of her generation among the haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy, painting duchesses and grand dukes and socialites.

In 1925, she painted her iconic work Auto-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) for the cover of the German fashion magazine Die Dame. As summed up by the magazine Auto-Journal in 1974, "the self-portrait of Tamara de Lempicka is a real image of the independent woman who asserts herself. Her hands are gloved, she is helmeted, and inaccessible; a cold and disturbing beauty [through which] pierces a formidable being—this woman is free!"

Famous for her libido, she was bisexual, and her affairs with both men and women were carried out in ways that were scandalous at the time. She often used formal and narrative elements in her portraits and nude studies to produce overpowering effects of desire and seduction.  During her heyday she was introduced to Italy's great man of letters and notorious lover, Gabriele d'Annunzio. She visited the poet twice at his Lake Garda villa, seeking to paint his portrait; he in turn was set on seduction. After these attempts to secure the commission, she left angered while both she and d'Annunzio remained unsatisfied.

Her husband tired of their relationship and in 1927 abandoned her.  The next year her longtime patron the Baron Raoul Kuffner von Diószeg made her his mistress. De Lempicka continued both her heavy workload and her frenetic social life through the next decade. The Great Depression had little effect on her; in the early 1930s she was painting King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen Elizabeth of Greece. Museums began to collect her works.

In the winter of 1939, Tamara and the Baron started an "extended vacation" in the United States. She immediately arranged for a show of her work in New York, though the Baron and Baroness chose to settle in Beverly Hills, California, living in the former residence of Hollywood director King Vidor. She became 'the baroness with a brush' and a favorite artist of Hollywood stars.

Madonna's Manhattan apartment with
Tamara's portrait of Nana de Herrera, 1930  

Her popularity waned with societal changes in style and taste, but Tamara lived long enough for the wheel of fashion to turn a full circle: before she died a new generation discovered her art and greeted it with enthusiasm. A 1973 retrospective drew positive responses. At the time of her death, her early Art Deco paintings were being shown and purchased once again.

The stageless play Tamara written by John Krizanc first ran in Toronto, then for nearly ten years in Los Angeles.  The story was based on the journal of Gabriele d'Annunzio's housekeeper Aelis Mazoyer, chronicling d'Annunzio's failed seduction of the artist.  Like the artist herself, the play was an original.

If you too love the enduring art of Tamara, come visit the Facebook page dedicated to her and the play she inspired.