Tamara De Lempicka Art Prints

Tamara de Lempicka, (16 May 1898 – 18 March 1980) noted Art Deco painter, was born Maria Górska in a wealthy family in Warsaw, Poland. In 1914 she married a lawyer named Tadeusz Lempicki in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1917, during the Russian Revolution, Tadeusz was arrested by the Bolsheviks. Although only seventeen years old, Tamara pleaded for, and finally secured, his release. The Lempickis then fled to Paris, France where she became known as Tamara de Lempicka. She studied art and became a well-known portrait painter, developing a distinctive and bold style, sometimes referred to as soft cubism, which epitomizes the cool modernism of Art Deco. She often used formal and narrative elements in her portraits and nude studies to produce overpowering effects of desire and seduction. Following World War I she became closely associated with lesbian and bisexual women in writing and artistic circles. At the outset of the Second World War she moved to Beverly Hills, California with her second husband, Baron Raoul Kuffner, whom she married in 1933. In 1943 they relocated to New York City where she continued to paint in her trademark style. After Baron Kuffner's death from a heart attack in 1962, Tamara moved to Houston, Texas and began painting in a new style, using a palette knife, rather than a brush, to lay down the paint. Her new paintings were not well received. She then swore that she would never exhibit her work again.