Tamara de Lempicka
(1898 - 1980) |
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Figurative works, still lifes Art Work
| Name: |
Tamara de Lempicka |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Warsaw |
| Nationality: |
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| Birth: |
1898 |
| Death: |
1980 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Figurative works, still lifes |
| Medium: |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painter
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Biography
Her paintings grace glossy calendars, postcards and book jackets, and her portraits of women are as much icons of the 1920s as Bauhaus lamps and tubular steel furniture. Yet Tamara de Lempicka had all but been forgotten when a major retrospective in Paris led to the rediscovery of her work in 1972.
Tamara de Lempicka was an enigmatic figure: while legends about her abound, little serious research has been conducted on her life. In portrait photographs she looks like a glamorous movie star, her eyes raised in the sensual, melancholy fashion of Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. She certainly knew how to put on a show: always flamboyantly dressed, she received her fashionable Parisian clients in a studio boasting modernistic chrome and aluminium furniture and an American bar, everything arranged down to the last detail. She frequented the city's sleazy/chic nightclubs and was known for her numerous affairs with men and women.
Born into the Polish upper classes, in 1916 she married Tadeusz Lempicka, a Russian lawyer. Two years later, they fled the Russian Revolution to Paris, where, without further ado, she appears to have ennobled' herself by adding the French deJ to her name, Initially, she attended the private Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, but a greater influence on her was the tuition she received from the Symbolist Maurice Denis and Andre Lhote, the latter combining the Cubism of Picasso and Braque with an elegant neoclassicism.
Lempicka developed an unmistakable signature that was a perfect complement to the Art Deco style of the inter-war years. She found inspiration not only in the work of lean- Auguste-Dominique Ingres or Rosalba Carriera, but also in cinema, photography and commercial art. Some of her most famous images, including a self-portrait of her at the wheel of a Bugatti, were originally covers for a women's magazine, Die Dame.
The full-length, life-size portrait of the Duchesse de la Salle is one of Lempicka s most important works; in terms of composition and genre, it is influenced by portraits of sixteenth and seventeenth-century rulers. Her black riding outfit, her self-assured and commanding air, and her smooth, black, short hair lend the duchess markedly androgynous features - only her delicate, manicured hand and red lips accentuate her femininity. There is a sense of restrained sensuality and aggression behind her controlled posture.
Her figure dominates the narrow, angular houses of the townscape behind her, a backdrop often used by the artist. The woman herself has been painted with greater realism than her Cubist-like surroundings, yet she is stylized in typical Lempicka fashion: she has a supple figure that is sharply outlined and her appearance is smooth and hard, almost metallic. All in all, the Duchess de la Salle embodies the New Woman' who was being promoted in 1920s literature, advertising and fashion pictures.
Lempicka's career peaked at the end of the 1930s. Now Baroness Huffner, she moved to the United States with her second husband in 1939, but in her mature work was never again able to replicate her pre-war successes. She spent the last years of her life in Mexico, where she died in 1980 aged eighty-one
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Samples of Work
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