The Supplement: Tamara de Lempicka

“Lempicka is best known for her Art Deco-styled portraits. Sexy, bedroom-eyed women in stylish dress are rendered in haunting poses. Perhaps it was her own dramatic life mirrored in her art. Married twice to wealthy, she moved from her native Poland to Russia, and then to Paris. In 1918, she studied painting at the Academe de la Grand Chaumiere, and was privately tutored by Maurice Denis. In 1925 she exhibited her works at the first Art Deco show in Paris. She moved to America in 1939 with her second husband, Baron Raoul Kuffner. Her works appeared exclusively at many galleries and museums, but her artistic output decreased. In 1960 she changed her style to abstract art and began creating works with a spatula. After her husband died in 1962 she ceased painting and moved to Mexico.”

http://www.mystudios.com/women/klmno/lempicka.html

Not to everyone’s taste, Lempicka’s paintings have become synonymous with the excesses and glamour of Bourgeois and High society. Lempicka spent her days painting commissioned portraits of wealthy individuals and female nudes (with a sip champagne inbetween) while the rest of her time was spent indulging on oysters and cocaine at extravagant parties. The world was at her feet and she thoroughly loved it.

“Her milieu was the glittery and scintillating Paris of the years between the wars, a place of high style and lascivious behaviour. With a callous authenticity, De Lempicka depicted the shifting morals of a Paris where nothing was precisely what it seemed. She lived and worked on the bisexual fringes of a society where there were no rules beyond the demands of style and entertainment. She was the great go-getter, a believer in exploiting one's resources to the ultimate.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2004/may/15/art

As the golden years of Art Deco drifted away in the face of the Great Depression, her commissions dried up and she changed subject matter, instead focusing on lower class society and nuns, mostly terrible. She then gave up painting all together.

Large Selection of her paintings: http://www.tamara-de-lempicka.org