
Tamara de Lempicka
Polish-Russian, French, American Painter
Movements and Styles: Art Deco, Queer Art, Proto-Feminist Artists
Born: May 16, 1898 - Warsaw, Poland (then Russia)
Died: March 18, 1980 - Cuernavaca, Mexico

Table of contents
> Summary> Key Ideas
> Artworks
> Biography & Legacy
Influences and Connections
Resources
"My goal was never to copy, but to create a new style, bright, luminous colors and to scent out elegance in my models."

Summary of Tamara de Lempicka
Tamara de Lempicka was the lone traditional easel painter in the entirety of the Art Deco style. Her sources of inspiration ranged dramatically: she adored Italian Renaissance painting; she was characterized by critics as a sort of modern-day Ingres, although the comparisons were more often not intended to flatter; she absorbed the avant garde art of the era - particularly post-cubist abstraction but of a "softened" style. Perhaps most influential was Lempicka's desire to capitalize on her social connections to create a niche for her portraiture, which most often featured well-to-do, cosmopolitan types. The Art Deco style, lavish in a less visually complex way than its predecessor, Art Nouveau, was probably the ideal vehicle for her trendy style. Most notably, despite its decorative quality, her work provided her with an outlet for unconventional self-expression: truly a product of her era, the libertine golden age between the two world wars, Lempicka, a bisexual, made bold, liberated female sexuality the linchpin of her art.
Key Ideas

Tamara de Lempicka was born Maria Gorska in Warsaw (then part of Russia). Her father was a Russian-Jewish lawyer and her mother was a Polish socialite. As a child of a well-off family, she went to boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 1911, she spent the summer with her grandmother in Italy, where she was introduced to the work of the great Italian painters, sparking a love of art that would inform the rest of her life.
Important Art by Tamara de Lempicka The below artworks are the most important by Tamara de Lempicka - that both overview the major creative periods, and highlight the greatest achievements by the artist. | |
![]() Artwork Images | Group of Four Nudes (1925)Artwork description & Analysis: Lempicka's Four Nudes from 1925 exudes eroticism and powerful femininity. In the picture, four contorted, nude women recline in a complex tangle of rounded, heavily modeled, and sharply outlined body parts. The robust, sensual figures with their sultry expressions are reminiscent of the nude bathers of Lempicka's artistic predecessors - from Ingres and Delacroix to Matisse and Picasso. Oil on canvas - Private collection |
![]() Artwork Images | Kizette in Pink (c.1926)Artwork description & Analysis: One of the many portraits of her daughter Kizette, this painting features her dressed in whitish pink from head to foot. She seems childishly to have lost a shoe and she tries to hide her sock with her other foot. It has been suggested that Kizette's slightly awkward position may be a reference to a well-known Russian Orthodox Christian icon of the Madonna and Child, the Theotokos of Tikhvin (c. 1300). In a highly venerated painting, the infant Jesus is holding an object, probably a scroll, and crosses one leg over the other much like Kizette does in her portrait. Oil on canvas - Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes - France |
![]() Artwork Images | La Belle Rafaela (1927)Artwork description & Analysis: Lempicka is said to have found a new model for her paintings in the Bois de Boulogne, a very large public park in Paris that was also the place where prostitutes often proffered their services. Known only to us, the viewers, as "Rafaela", she became the main muse and subject for Lempicka's paintings for over a year. Oil on canvas - Private Collection |
More Tamara de Lempicka Artwork and Analysis:
Influences and Connections


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Influences on Artist


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Content compiled and written by Anna Souter
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
" Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Anna Souter
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
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First published on 22 Dec 2016. Updated and modified regularly.
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