It is very difficult to find an artist who has stood out from the rest of his peers who does not have some disturbing, dramatic or crazy element in his personal life. It’s like an almost perfect formula for success in the thorny art world of all time. Tamara de Lempicka was no exception.
Image: Alicia Loria
The data that we knew during her existence regarding her past is an absolute lie, she herself was in charge of giving a different version of her life to each passenger, so years later it was learned that she was born under the name of Tamara Gurwik-Gorska in the year 1895 in Moscow, Russia. She claimed to have been born in Warsaw, Poland in 1898, a date that in her last years changed to 1902, it is not known if she was for simple coquetry or because she really, as her biographers portray her, she was a great liar.
Image: Civilization&Barbarism
She grew up in a wealthy family and discovered her passion for art as a child when traveling to Italy with her grandmother. This would be her most lasting and true relationship, the one she would maintain with art. She married in 1916 with Tadeusz Lempicki and he had a daughter named Kizette, a recurring model in his paintings. She, divorced from her first husband, remarried in 1929 with a collector of her work, Baron Raoul Kuffner, and she settled in the United States, where she would spend most of her life to die in Cuernavaca, the city of Mexico in 1980.
Tamara was a rebellious, independent, bisexual, transgressive and liberal woman. His life was surrounded by a world of excesses: cocaine, occasional orgies and lovers who seemed to have no limit. Her whole life full of self-inflicted drama is reflected in his works.
Image: All Posters
Art Decó was the trend that saw her succeed. The women protagonists of his paintings are mostly real models that he managed to capture between cubism, which is not abstract art, bright colors, nudes, voluminous bodies worthy of Botticelli, expressions of great depth representing melancholy and decadence of the 1930s.
Lempicka has really been an excellent capturer of the feelings of those around her. Men and women who belonged to her social circle full of hypocrisy and promiscuity. The reflection of sadness, lost looks, loneliness and forbidden stories These are undoubtedly the main features of his most famous works.