Who Was Tamara de Lempicka?

Tamara de Lempicka changed her name and biography throughout her life. Only recently was her actual birth name—Tamara Rosa Hurwitz-Gorska—uncovered, thanks to the work of Polish researchers and a recently discovered document found in a Russian archive. That document, a conversion register published in 1904–5, details the conversion of her well-to-do Polish parents, Malwina Gabryela Dekler and Benno Wilhelm Hurwitz, from Judaism to Christianity in 1891. Their three children, Stanislaw, Tamara, and Adriana, were baptized in November 1897. This document also reveals Lempicka’s actual birth date as June 16, 1894—a departure from the 1898 or 1905 birth dates she claimed at various points. And, while Lempicka asserted she was born in either Warsaw or St. Petersburg, scholars believe she may have actually been born in Moscow.

When Lempicka was a girl in Warsaw, her grandmother Klementyna Dekler took her on formative trips to France and Italy, touring the churches and museums of Venice, Florence, and Rome. Artists of the Italian Renaissance and the Mannerists would come to influence Lempicka later on.

As a 17-year-old in 1911, Lempicka attended a masked ball in St. Petersburg dressed as a peasant walking a goose on a leash, and it was on that night that she met Tadeusz Lempicki, a Polish lawyer with links to aristocratic families. The pair wed in 1916 and were a frequent fixture at the sort of society balls and parties that were part of St. Petersburg’s last glory days.

The couple’s daughter, Marie-Christine de Lempicka, was born only a few months after their wedding. Nicknamed Kizette, she modeled for her mother as a child. In fact, Lempicka’s first sale to a public institution would be Kizette in Pink (1927), acquired by the Fine Arts Museum of Nantes in 1928. “Tamara was an artist and a mother in that order,” Kizette would later write in a 1987 biography of her mother, Passion by Design.

Sometime between 1918 and 1919, Lempicka arrived in Paris with Kizette (Tadeusz had been arrested by the Soviet secret police and accused of spying for czarist networks). Within a decade she would be an artist with connections across Europe and the United States. Her identity shifted upon arrival, in part to obscure her gender and Jewish heritage. The artist signed her early Parisian canvases as Monsieur Lempitzky, using the masculine suffix instead of the feminine Lempitzka, and this was how she debuted in Parisian salons between 1922 and 1925. Beyond this deliberate gender ambiguity, Lempicka obscured her family history, for example claiming that her brother Stanislaw died at war (in reality he’d become a communist). She also painted saints and Madonnas to assert her family’s adopted Christianity.

Tadeusz was released in 1919 and reunited with Lempicka in Paris, where he sold off personal items to keep the family afloat. He was also confronted with the reality of his wife’s many lovers, one of whom was a married woman named Ira Perrot. The two women met soon after Lempicka arrived in Paris, probably when they were neighbors at Place de Wagram. Perrot became Lempicka’s most frequent model from the 1920s onward, and they remained linked until the artist’s death. Lempicka’s earliest exhibited painting, at the 1922 Salon d’Automne, was a depiction of Perrot, Portrait of a Young Woman in a Blue Dress.

Lempicka was openly bisexual and painted lesbian couples early on, such as in Perspective (The Two Girlfriends), which was shown at the 1923 Salon d’Automne. “I live life in the margins of society,” Lempicka is quoted as saying in Passion by Design. “And the rules of normal society don’t apply in the margins.” (Her marginal habits included using cocaine and painting while listening to Richard Wagner at full blast.)

Always incredibly stylish, in the 1920s Lempicka would hang out at Paul Poiret parties or Montmartre nightclubs wearing clothes designed by Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli. Fashion wasn’t just part of her lifestyle; it was part of her career: Lempicka actually started out as a fashion illustrator in 1921. After studying illustrations in magazines such as Vogue, she began creating her own for French fashion magazines such as Femina and L’illustration des modes.

Meanwhile, she studied art—first at the Académie Ranson with Maurice Denis, whom she deemed too conventional. Lempicka then began studying with Cubist painter André Lhote, who taught her draftsmanship and showed her how to make historical references look contemporary. Using nude models, he demonstrated the art of simplifying figures into geometric forms. This skill was bolstered by Lempicka’s frequent visits to the Louvre and a few trips to Italy in the mid-1920s, where she studied works by artists such as Botticelli and Pontormo. Part of Lempicka’s practice was recycling Old Master motifs, for example transforming the reclining pose of Pontormo’s Venus in Venus and Cupid (1532–34) into her Portrait of the Marquis d’Afflitto (1925). In her painting The Round Dance (ca. 1932), she reinvented a trio of figures at the lower left of Parmigianino’s Madonna with the Long Neck (1534–35).

Italy is also where Lempicka had her first solo exhibition, in 1925 at the Milanese Bottega di Poesia gallery. Among the 30 paintings she showed were many portraits, attracting critical attention and portrait commissions from wealthy Italians. Lempicka was working on Tadeusz’s portrait around the time that their divorce became final, in 1928. His figure is set against a sleek background of gray skyscrapers, and his left hand is unfinished where his wedding band would have been.

A few months later Lempicka sailed to the United States for the first time, setting foot in New York in April 1929 wearing two-tone shoes, a pleated dress, fur coat, and cloche hat. This visit marked her introduction to the American art scene as she traveled from Manhattan to Detroit and California. She deepened ties with American collectors and also showed her work at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh, where she won no awards but caught the eye of art critic Edward Alden Jewell, who lauded her work in an illustrated New York Times article.

Lempicka soon found similar success at home in Paris, with her first solo exhibition there in spring 1930 at the Galerie Colette Weil.

Her social life as an untethered woman was a colorful one. In the early 1930s she lived in a chrome-heavy studio apartment at 7 rue Méchain, designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens and decorated by her sister. (The apartment is now the home of photographer Amanda Eliasch, who retained some original features.) Lempicka hosted frequent parties, attended by an international cohort of designers, diplomats, and aristocrats including the Pasha of Marrakesh, politician Michel Clemenceau, and artist friends such as Kees van Dongen and Moïse Kisling.

Lempicka’s single life (which included a relationship with singer Suzy Solidor) came to a halt in 1934 when she married Baron Raoul Kuffner de Diószegh. Another name change ensued, and she started referring to herself as Baroness Kuffner. Despite her plush lifestyle, Lempicka’s luxe paintings of 1920s evolved into more meditative works in the 1930s, including images of suffering and refugees.

In 1938, amid the growing political upheaval in Europe, and alarmed by the rise of the Nazis, Lempicka decided to immigrate to the United States. She held one last party at her studio in February 1939 and then left for New York with her husband. By this point she’d abandoned her breakthrough Art Deco style and was taking a more cinematic approach to her figures, adding greater dramatic intensity; she was also creating more still lifes.

By 1940 Lempicka and the baron were living in Beverly Hills, in the former home of filmmaker King Vidor. They would later buy a duplex in New York on East 57th Street. When Kizette was able to join them in Los Angeles, Lempicka introduced her as a sister (since she’d already told new acquaintances that she was childless).

Lempicka persuaded art dealer Julien Levy to mount three exhibitions of her work in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles in 1941, paid for by her husband. They were all financial flops, possibly because, among other reasons, her figurative paintings were out of step with movements of the moment such as abstraction.

Slowly receding from public view, Lempicka experimented in the 1950s with painting abstractions with a palette knife. “The works she painted in the 1950s and 1960s had limited public exposure; they were executed for the artist’s own amusement, rarely exhibited, and largely retained in her house until her death in 1980,” curator Rinaldi told ARTnews. Lempicka did exhibit some later works in Rome in 1957 and at the Galerie Ror Volmar in Paris in 1961, but these had the effect of showcasing her technical decline and misalignment with predominant art trends. “Critics did not know where to place precisely the works of this mysterious baroness who wanted to paint like a European Old Master,” Rinaldi said. She earned more recognition with a 1972 exhibition, Tamara de Lempicka de 1925 à 1935, at the Parisian Galerie du Luxembourg.

“All her life Tamara de Lempicka remained a working artist, even when the public and many critics apparently abandoned her,” her daughter wrote in Passion by Design. “She stopped exhibiting. She did not stop painting.”

After the baron died, in 1961, she settled in Houston to be closer to her daughter. When Houston summers were too hot, she went to a second home in Cuernavaca outside Mexico City. Friends there encouraged her to resume her painting practice, which she did by looking at her earlier paintings and recreating them. A 1980 photograph of her peach-colored bedroom shows walls adorned with four such works, including, above her bed, a looser 1974/1979 version of Tamara in the Green Bugatti. All those decades later, Lempicka was still driving in her own direction.

Before she died in her Cuernavaca home in September 1980, Lempicka asked her neighbor and friend, artist Victor Contreras, to scatter her ashes above the Popocatépetl volcano in central Mexico. Riding in a helicopter over this active stratovolcano, he fulfilled her final flamboyant wish.

“Tamara de Lempicka” is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, through May 26, 2025.