Tamara Łempicka — a painter born in Warsaw is one of the most outstanding artists of the 20th century, as she developed her own style based on models drawn from great masters, but inscribed in her own unique poetics of stylization and sublimation. Despite living and working abroad, she felt Polish until the end of her days and was only able to express her emotions in Polish. March 18 marks the 45th anniversary of her death.
Her paintings appearing at art auctions are reaching increasingly higher prices, sometimes exceeding 20 million dollars. In the great center of world fashion, which is Milan, enlarged reproductions of many of her paintings depicting elegantly dressed women, such as Girl in a Green Dress, fill the spacious streets of the city center every year. Her canvases are included in the collections of famous actors such as Jack Nicholson and singers such as Madonna.
When her last life companion and heir, Mexican sculptor Victor Contreras, came to Warsaw in the autumn of 2019 as a guest of the National Museum (MNW), he said that Tamara felt Polish until the end of her days and was only able to express her emotions in Polish. This was said by the man who, at the request of the great artist, scattered her ashes over the depths of the dormant giant volcano Popocatépetl. Although unfortunately nothing came of the exhibition planned at the MNW at that time (not for the first time, by the way), and her paintings and other works ended up in Lublin, not in Warsaw, she should be permanently included on the list of artists with Warsaw roots.
Origins and paths of artistic life
Many facts in Tamara's biography remain in the shadow of uncertainty. She was born in 1898, but it is not certain whether in Moscow or Warsaw. Her father, Borys Gurwik-Górski, was supposed to be a wealthy Russian Jew, a merchant or industrialist. Her mother, Malwina née Dekler, came from a wealthy Polish family with Jewish roots. The grave of her brother, Zygmunt Dekler, is located in the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. The artist's careful erasure of the Jewish origins of her mother's family is intriguing. When speaking about her and her family, she invariably emphasized her Polishness. Together with her siblings, she was raised by her mother and grandparents Dekler in Warsaw. It is probable that she even falsified her birth certificate, giving Warsaw as her place of birth instead of Moscow.
In 1911, Tamara moved to her relatives in St. Petersburg, where she studied drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1916, she married Tadeusz Łempicki. That same year, their daughter, Maria Krystyna, nicknamed Kizette, was born. It was not without difficulty that they managed to escape from Russia, which was engulfed by revolution.
In the summer of 1918, the Łempicka family reached Paris, where Tamara began studying with Maurice Denis. The most important teacher for our artist, however, was André Lhote, a painter, decorator, critic and art theoretician. It was from him that she learned how to skillfully combine modern methods of imagery with the great academic tradition of artists such as Poussin, David and Ingres. As Goia Mori, an outstanding researcher of Łempicka's work, emphasizes, Tamara's works began to be characterized by post-cubist stylization, in which forms are built from simple shapes, but put together within classical arrangements. The development of an individual artistic style was also influenced by her fascination with the art of the Italian Renaissance, which she learned at its very sources.
Triumph in Italy and "Self-portrait at the wheel"
“I owe a great deal to Italy,” Tamara confessed in 1932. It was in Italy, in Milan, in 1925, that she became famous. She grew into a true star nowhere else than on the famous via Montenapoleone, in the Bottega di Poesia, run by Count Emanuele Castelbarco. Her fame in Italy is undoubtedly connected with the fact that many of her paintings refer to great Italian artists such as Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Pontormo, Marcello Venusti and Bernini. Łempicka’s paintings suggestively convey the atmosphere of the roaring twenties. For example, her Self-portrait at the wheel from 1929 can be considered a symbolic image of an emancipated woman of that time. A journalist from “La Pologne” wrote that: “Tamara de Łempicka’s models are modern women. They do not know hypocrisy and shame in the categories of bourgeois morality. They are tanned and weather-beaten, and their bodies are as supple as those of Amazons.” Self-portrait in a green Bugatti is Tamara Łempicka’s most famous and most frequently reproduced work. It quickly became an iconic image of the modern woman of the interwar period.
Tadeusz, Tamara's first husband, could not keep up with the pace of her artistic life; they divorced. In 1934, Łempicka married Baron Raoul Kuffner, the owner of a large estate in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the winter of 1938, she and her husband decided to leave Europe. Probably concerned about the rising wave of fascism, they sold their estate and left for the United States.
In Hollywood, Tamara Łempicka became an extremely popular portraitist of the acting world. After the war, she was unable to develop a new style. After her husband's death in 1962, Łempicka abandoned painting and moved to Mexico, where she died on March 18, 1980.
The Warsaw-born painter is one of the most outstanding artists of the 20th century, as she has developed her own style based on models drawn from great masters, but inscribed with her own unique poetics of stylization and sublimation.
