“I want people to notice my works at first glance among a hundred others. The painter Tamara de Lempicka was answered: her instantly recognizable style made her one of the major figures of Art Deco.
Born in Warsaw in 1898 into a wealthy family, she grew up in Saint Petersburg. In 1916 she married a young lawyer, Tadeusz Lempicki. The October Revolution forced the couple to emigrate to Paris. She then decided to become a painter.
Pupil of Maurice Denis, representative of the Nabi movement, Tamara de Lempicka acquired a sense of light and decorative painting, and from the cubist André Lhote, the concern for composition, volumes and colors. Drawing on these influences and her fine knowledge of the figurative tradition of the Italian Renaissance, she forged a personal style that incorporated the codes of the time. It borrows, for example, from the cinema the tight framing or even from the advertising poster the impact of the opposition of colors. The rendering of the skin, the treatment of the fabrics, the bodies worked like powerful architectures are all references to 16th century mannerism, but the geometric construction of his paintings is marked by cubism.
An exhibition in Milan in 1925 launched his career. She quickly became the official portrait painter of all of Paris during the Roaring Twenties and one of the most prominent personalities of the interwar period. Lempicka celebrates the desire for the emancipation of women. She paints bold, free, sensual, transgressive women without qualms.
Remarried to a wealthy Hungarian baron, the painter moved to the United States in 1939. After trying her hand at abstraction, she retired from the artistic scene and fell into oblivion. She died in 1980. By rediscovering the Art Deco aesthetic, the 1970s would once again bring her work to the fore.
