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Art of the 20th Century
Tamara de Lempicka
Tamara de Lempicka
(b Warsaw, 1898; d Texas, 18 March 1980).
American painter of Polish birth. She lived among the wealthy aristocracy in St Petersburg and fled with her husband from the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1918 she arrived in Paris, where she studied briefly at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse, before studying under Maurice Denis at the Académie Ranson, and then under André Lhote. Lhote’s theories of composition, his insistence on careful figure studies and the precise application of paint, often using pure colour, provided the groundwork for her own style of freely interpreted Synthetic Cubism. This rapidly became identified with Art Deco and with modernity of style and subject-matter. All her paintings were carefully composed. She made little attempt to create three-dimensional effects, but using hard, angular lines and shapes contrasted against rounded, soft forms she created a highly stylized view of the world, in particular of the sophisticated society of Paris. Her subject-matter was generally exotic, whether in the celebratory feminine ‘glamour’ of Young Girl in Green (c. 1928; Paris, Pompidou) or in the suave, elegantly dressed, fashionable figures in the quasi-religious Adam and Eve (1932; Geneva, Petit Pal.). Occasionally scenes of naked women in intertwined compositions recall those of Ingres. Her stylish and mannered portraits sought to convey the wealth of her aristocratic sitters. Her reputation went into eclipse after her move to the USA in 1939, although a retrospective exhibition in Paris in 1972 heralded a renewed interest in the paintings of her youth.
Tamara de
Lempicka
