Born 16. May 1898 in Warsaw, family Jewish, father attorney, wealthy
1908 she draws her first portrait
1911 Lausanne, boarding school, boring school, she left with her grandmother for Italy
1912 after her parents divorce she lives with her aunt Stefa in St.Petersburg
1916 marries Polish lawyer Tadeusz Lempicki in the chapel of the Knights of Malta in St.Petersburg
1917 Revolution. Her husband is arrested. She frees him from prison – together with the Swedish consul, by “offering her favours”. The couple flees to Paris
Paris (1918-39). Tamara studied painting, is influenced by Maurice Denis and André Lhote. As Tadeusz proved unwilling or unable to find suitable work, she starts to be a professional and to sell her paintings, f.e. her portrait of daughter Kizette (born 1919)
Her best known work might be “Autoportrait, Tamara in green Bugatti”
“I was the first woman to paint cleanly, and that was the basis of my success. From a hundred pictures, mine will always stand out. And so the galleries began to hang my work in their best rooms, always in the middle, because my painting was attractive. It was precise. It was ‘finished’.”
Her car wasn’t a green Bugatti, but a little yellow Renault, stolen one night when she was with her friends at “La Rotonde” in Montparnasse.
1939, after WWII began, the couple moved to the USA, where Tamara found large success. Meanwhile she’d married the Austrian Baron Kuffner who later died from a heart attack on the ship “Liberté” on its way to New York. Her daughter married too and settled in Houston, where Lempicka joined her in later years.
Finally Tamara settled in Mexican Cuernavaca “the city of eternal spring”, her daughter took care of her.
Tamara de Lempicka died there aged 81 the 18.3.1980. Following her wishes her ashes were scattered over the volcano Popocatepetl.
Tamara is another example for lifelines going from east to west.
She was bisexual and had many love affairs with both sexes. Her hedonistic lifestyle was nourished purely by her own work.
P.S. Kizette published two books about her mother