Tamara de Lempicka thoroughly embodied the art deco ideal with her distinctly styled, soft cubist paintings that keenly encapsulate a particular kind of swagger and luxe. They often depict glittery socialites and the many lovers—male and female—she adored and seduced. Born in Warsaw in 1898, she lived for a while in St. Petersburg with her attorney husband; the two fled after he was arrested during the Bolshevik Revolution. After they moved to Paris, she learned how to earn a living with her art. The pictures she created feature women wearing high fashion, including Jean Patou knitwear, and silk bias-cut dresses by Madame Vionnet. In a 1930 painting, de Lempicka’s mistress, Ira Perrot, shows off a white satin, body-clinging, asymmetrically ruffled robe—an idealized silver-screen outfit and similar to looks de Lempicka often wore in public. De Lempicka lived a glinting, fashionable life, faithfully channeled in the crisp, graphic images she produced and the clothes she wore. She dressed to impress and kept company with the beautiful and clever. As a regular visitor to the American writer Natalie Barney’s tea-and-more salons, she met Jean Cocteau and other contacts, including the Marchesa Luisa Casati, who introduced her to the photographer Baron Adolph de Meyer and the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio.
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Tamara de Lempicka, Paris, 1932.
De Lempicka’s elegant wardrobe attained the height of style each season, the finest fashion had to offer. She loved hats; her favorite milliner was Rose Descat, whose on-trend constructions, worn by the elite in Europe and New York, typically had exaggerated silhouettes such as flying saucers and dinner plates. But she also made less fussy cloche or veiled pillbox hats; de Lempicka had cupboards full of them. The artist also favored the Parisian designer Marcel Rochas, who founded his fashion house in 1925. She wore Charles Creed suiting and sable fur coats, and her hair was coiffed into glorious blonde curls.
Some critics feel that de Lempicka’s artistic achievement was less lofty; her works are too specific to a moment in time. The Newsweek art critic Peter Plagens wrote that she was “the end product, not the producer of art that influences other artists.” Fashion, by nature, goes out of fashion, but good art is meant to last. But if de Lempicka’s art relies on surface appeal, her legacy as a stylish, independent woman, who burned brightly for a short time, endures. Her work has been showcased around the world—for example, at London’s Royal Academy in 2004 and in 2015 at the Piano Nobile di Palazzo Forti in Verona—and is collected by luminaries such as designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, whose autumn/winter 2000 collection was based on a de Lempicka canvas Stefano gave Domenico in 1997. De Lempicka evaluated her own artistic purpose simply enough. In addition to making money to live, she said, “My goal was never to copy, but to create a new style, bright, luminous colors and to scent out elegance in my models.”
The leather driving cap worn in de Lempicka’s famous 1929 Autoportrait (Tamara in a Green Bugatti) is based on one by Hermès.
De Lempicka’s modernist drive is illuminated in her famous Autoportrait (Tamara in a Green Bugatti) (1929), created for the cover of German fashion magazine Die Dame. The image shows the epitome of an unfettered, liberated woman; a little remote, a little aloof, but wealthy and up to the minute. Ironically, de Lempicka never owned a Bugatti; her car, a yellow Renault, was stolen on a night out. She was the queen of appearance; both her artwork and her personal style were all about putting on a brave and impressive show regardless of reality. The smooth lines and shiny surfaces of art deco reflected an aspirational and eager-to-please aesthetic that isn’t complicated to understand. De Lempicka wanted to succeed in life; her art and fashion sense were contemporary and satisfying at a time when the deprivations of revolution and war were still fresh.
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.”
—Tamara de Lempicka, 1925, artquotes.com
Getty Images: Bettmann
Tamara de Lempicka at her easel, 1930s.
Today de Lempicka remains a favorite with fashion designers, who admire the lustrous sheen of her imagery. That’s what fashion is for many: a way to put on a brave face—the shinier and more perfect the better. De Lempicka—painting at her easel in a gauzy tulle evening dress, with four rows of pearls and armfuls of diamond bracelets—wove her own fantasy. Her Girl with Gloves (1929) is beautifully reproduced in Alber Elbaz’s 2014 resort collection for Lanvin: a perfectly modern green dress, dramatic and fabulous; the collection also featured a one-shoulder, ruffled floor-length red-carpet frock that looks made for de Lempicka’s model. Peter Copping’s autumn/winter 2011 collection for Nina Ricci also channeled de Lempicka and her love of Marcel Rochas’s flounced and pleated confections. Madonna—also a de Lempicka collector—was shot by Steven Meisel for Marc Jacobs’s Louis Vuitton advertising campaign (autumn/winter 2009); the de Lempicka luster is evident in the sultry, smoky eye, jewel-colored dress with ruffles, and Hollywood-glam waved hair.
De Lempicka knew what looked good; in her heyday she worked as a fashion model, becoming a regular subject for Austrian photographer Madame D’Ora (Dora Kallmus). Before immersing herself in fine art, she had turned her hand to fashion illustration. From portraying women with a more androgynous look, as in the sophisticated simplicity of Blue Scarf (1930s), to the amply curved nude of La Belle Rafaela (1927), her paintings elucidate ways that still seem modern.