Tamara de Lempicka

"La Bella Rafaela"

1996

Described by one of her earliest collectors as the “first pop star of the century,” Tamara de Lempicka created colorful paintings that radiate with Art Deco's signature blend of elegance and modernity.

Born in Poland at the turn of the 20th century, Lempicka was forced to flee to France in 1918 after the beginning of the Russian Revolution. During a visit to Italy in her youth, she became enraptured by the Italian Old Masters. Inspired by this formative experience, Lempicka enrolled in Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris to take up painting.

Lempicka studied under famed avant-garde artists Maurice Denis and André Lhote, who introduced her to Cubism, and she began exhibiting at the Parisian salons as early as 1922. Lempicka became a fixture in Parisian high society, spending much of her time hosting wealthy elites in her atelier on Rue Méchain.

Exceptional floral still-lifes by Lempicka epitomize the artist's talent for capturing sensual beauty, no matter her chosen subject or style. During the early 1960s, works such as Le bouquet de lilas (Bouquet of Lilacs) show how she masterfully used color and texture to create a remarkable sense of depth in her still-life paintings. Ever the adventurer, Lempicka began exploring new painting techniques even at this mature stage of her career. She used her palette knife as one of her main implements, creating new textures and ways of directly applying color in her works.

With a resurgence of appreciation for the Art Deco period, combined with the success of her retrospective at Galerie de Luxembourg in 1971, Lempicka’s work has achieved remarkable acclaim in recent decades. Much of her work resides in museums worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée des Beaux-Arts du Havre, and the National Museum Warsaw, among others.

Alain Blondel, the esteemed French author who compiled the artist’s catalogue raisonné, wrote fondly of Lempicka’s uniqueness: “Tamara de Lempicka will always continue to defy categorization. Her art and her life destiny do not fit into the usual framework for 20th-century artists. The idea that art could be a profession was foreign to Lempicka. Her life and her painting were too closely intertwined for that.”

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(Biography provided by M.S. Rau)