Something I don’t often discuss in my articles here at Bi.org is that I am a painter. It’s a joyous hobby, and one that I sometimes even get paid for. In my artwork I strive to depict meditations on femininity as well as explore the female perspective, both as a woman and a queer person. So when I travel abroad and visit museums, artists whose work melds both of those viewpoints always halts me in my tracks.
Back in 2014, I was on my first solo trip through Europe and found myself perusing the various world-famous art museums of Paris. I came across two painters who shared these focal points. The first that caught my eye was Cubist Marie Laurencin. The second, and today’s subject, was the work of Art Deco icon Tamara de Lempicka.
Born in Warsaw, Poland (then part of Russia) in 1898 to a Jewish father and socialite mother, Tamara Rosalia Gurwik-Gorska enjoyed a childhood of leisure before World War I. After a brief stint in a Swiss boarding school, Tamara feigned illness and ended up going on a grand tour of Europe with her grandmother, taking in the sights in Monaco but truly falling in love with the Italian Renaissance paintings she encountered in the museums in Rome and Milan.
At 16, Tamara married a proud attorney named Tadeusz Lempicki. Three years later, in 1917, the Russian Revolution frightened most of her relatives away from Russia, and for good reason. Not long after, the Bolsheviks invaded their house in the middle of the night while the couple was in flagrante delecto and hauled Lempicki away. It took time — and, most sources imply, sexual favors — but the young de Lempicka was able to free herself and secure the release of her husband with the help of the Swedish consul.
As most of their possessions had been ransacked, the couple became refugees, making their way across Europe before eventually settling in Paris in 1919. By this time, de Lempicka had given birth to their only child, Maria, nicknamed “Kizette”. While they had found a home, the funds leftover from selling family jewels were dwindling, and her husband was either unable or unwilling to find work. So, out of necessity, de Lempicka decided to support her family by learning how to paint.
After enrolling at the Académie de la Grand Chaumiére in 1921, de Lempicka excelled under the tutelage of teacher and critic André Lohte. As the Roaring Twenties set in, she began to both form her style — Art Deco mixed with Futurism and some Cubism — as well as her selling niche portraits of the European elite.
It was during this decade that de Lempicka’s life took an entirely new turn. After gaining the notice of fashion magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, her work came into high demand and propelled her to fame. Much of her art focused on the softness and strength of the female figure, infusing her paintings with the independence of the “flapper girl” persona while also expressing women’s newfound sexual agency. She became well-known in the Parisian bohemian scene and often outworked her male counterparts of the time, usually painting for 9–12 hours a day.
With her notoriety came a new wave of fortune which she savored, often using loans from fashion houses like Chanel to create a bold visage as she entered galleries to conduct business or attended high-tone parties. With her husband off on his own affairs, de Lempicka (whose angular beauty often led to comparisons to Greta Garbo) also changed her own social life by taking on a stream of male and female lovers from the scene, often the models of her works. (One famous story is that she agreed to paint her lover, lesbian singer Suzy Solidor, on the condition that she sat for her in the nude — to which she obliged. This later became one of de Lempicka’s most famous portraits.)
The good times, however, were not to last. In 1928, her husband divorced her on the grounds of her affairs (despite the fact that, by all accounts, he had his own fair share). After marrying Baron Raul Kuffner, an art collector from the Austro-Hungarian empire, de Lempicka became more and more alarmed at the rise of the Nazi party throughout the ‘30s, and in 1939, she and her husband fled to the US for the oncoming war. While she first landed in Los Angeles and received commissions to paint portraits of Hollywood movie stars, post-war tastes in the art world changed and her iconic style fell out of fashion. Though she dabbled in new styles, she was often seen as a novelty, getting dubbed with the condescending nickname “The Baroness with the Paintbrush”. After her husband’s death, de Lempicka moved to Texas to be closer to her daughter (whom she rarely saw, but had painted often in childhood) and retired from art in the early 1960s. She spent her final years in Mexico.
But the world was not done with de Lempicka. A renewed interest in Art Deco saw a revival of interest in her work in the late 1960s, and since then her paintings have continued to garner attention and acclaim. Some of her most well-known celebrity collectors include Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand, and Madonna, who owns a large collection and who often uses a pastiche of de Lempicka’s style in her music videos.
de Lempicka died in 1980, requesting that her ashes be scattered over a volcano. The artist was a source of controversy both during and after her life, but to me, much of it seems out of place. Many avant-garde artists sneered at her enjoying the fruits of her labor, but this came from a gaggle of middle-class artists who posed as poor for the clout. It seems rather rich to call a woman bougie who, just a few years prior, had been a refugee and lost everything to revolution and strife. American artists considered her a dilettante and dismissed her important, decisive, and feminist work that brought women to the forefront of the art world on the European continent.
Critics later got on her case for her painting portraits of people who went on to play prominent roles in the spread across Europe. To describe this to some ill intent, however, doesn’t seem to align with the woman we see: a painter of Jewish ancestry who fled the continent and left everything behind when she saw where Germany was heading. Particularly with the accusation regarding Solidor — who was often deemed “the most painted woman in the world” — it seems a stretch to assert that de Lempicka’s painting elevated people to a place of greater political power. Perhaps that comes across as apologetic, but these claims don’t seem to stack up.
Of course, this write-up takes on only a fraction of a life of defiance from this painter. If you’d like to learn more, I highly suggest reading up on this daring woman. But one thing is for sure: Tamara de Lempicka was incisive, bold, and trailblazing. And she was bi.
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