Tamara de Lempicka

The artist was born as Tamara Gorska in Warsaw, Poland around the turn of the century.  She summered in St. Petersburg and married a well-to-do Russian lawyer, Tadeusz de Lempicki in 1916.  Two years later the couple fled the Bolshevik Revolution for Paris, moving into the circle of exiled Russian nobility and other out-of-work aristocrats.  It was there that de Lempicka took up painting, applying the principle of Cubism in traditional subjects such as landscapes, nudes and portraits.

Ambitious in her art, de Lempicka managed to turn her headlong lifestyle into a business asset.  Her notoriety attracted clients; clients became patrons; patrons turned into lovers.  Tadeusz de Lempicki divorced her in 1928.  In 1933 she married Baron Raoul Kuffner.  De Lempicka flourished through the Depression, but in 1939, she and Kuffner left for the United States, eventually landing in Beverly Hills, where her reputation faded.  Later they moved to New York, then Houston, Texas and finally Cuernava, Mexico, where she died in 1980.