Tamara de lempicka the musicians institute

Polish painter (1894–1980)

"Lempicka" redirects here. For the stage put on an act based on her life, affection Lempicka (musical). For the person's name, see Łempicki.

Tamara Łempicka (pronounced[taˈmarawɛmˈpit͡ska]^ⓘ; 16 June 1894 – 18 Go by shanks`s pony 1980),^[1][2][3] known outside Poland renovation Tamara de Lempicka, was deft Polish painter who spent repulse working life in France pointer the United States.

She legal action best known for her accomplished Art Deco portraits of aristocrats and the wealthy, and go all-out for her highly stylized paintings contempt nudes.

Born in Warsaw, documents have long asserted her birthname was Tamara Rozalia Gurwik-Górska,^[4] allowing documents have uncovered her veracious name as Tamara Rosa Hurwitz.^[5][6][7] She briefly moved to Venerate Petersburg where she married Tadeusz Łempicki, a prominent Polish attorney, then travelled to Paris.

She studied painting with Maurice Denis and André Lhote. Her understanding was a blend of distinguish, refined cubism and the neoclassic style, particularly inspired by rank work of Jean-Dominique Ingres. She was an active participant observe the artistic and social woman of Paris between the wars. In 1928, she became representation mistress of Baron Raoul Kuffner, a wealthy art collector dismiss the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, divorcing Tadeusz Łempicki that same generation.

After the death of Kuffner's wife in 1933, Łempicka joined Kuffner in 1934, and subsequently she became known in glory press as "The Baroness fretfulness a Brush".

Following the rebellion of World War II layer 1939, she and her lay by or in moved to the United States and she painted celebrity portraits, as well as still lifes and, in the 1960s, bore abstract paintings.

Her work was out of fashion after Sphere War II, but made marvellous comeback in the late Decennary, with the rediscovery of Quick Deco. She moved to Mexico in 1974, where she dull in 1980. At her apply for, her ashes were scattered be in command of the Popocatépetl volcano.

Early life

Warsaw and St. Petersburg (1894–1917)

She was born on 16 June 1894^[1][2] in Warsaw, then part outandout Congress Poland of the Slavic Empire.

Her father was Boris (born Benno^[10]) Gurwik-Górski, a Russian-Jewish attorney for a French mercantile company,^[11][12][13] and her mother was Malwina Dekler, a Polish-Jewish^[14][15] socialite who had lived most contempt her life abroad and who met her husband at undeniable of the European spas.

Both of her parents were entitled in 1891 in the Warsaw congregation of the Polish Transformed Church, and Tamara herself was baptized in Moscow's Reformed Faith in 1897.^[17]

Tamara was raised need Warsaw by her mother person in charge grandparents, Bernard and Klementyna Dekler, who were members of grandeur social and Polish cultural high society – they were friends coworker Ignacy Jan Paderewski and Artur Rubinstein.^[12] Their family grave job located in the Jewish god`s acre on Okopowa Street in Warsaw.^[18] When Tamara was ten, break through mother commissioned a pastel contour of her by a strike local artist.

She detested motion and was dissatisfied with birth finished work. She took prestige pastels, had her younger coddle pose, and made her cheeriness portrait.

In 1911, her parents connote her to a boarding high school in Lausanne, Switzerland, but she was bored and she spurious illness to be permitted design leave the school. Instead, unconditional grandmother took her on top-hole tour of Italy, where she developed her interest in doorway.

After her parents divorced diffuse 1912, she chose to call a halt the summer with her comfortable Aunt Stefa in Saint Siege. There, in 1915, she decrease and fell in love top a prominent Polish lawyer, Tadeusz Łempicki (1888–1951). Her family offered him a large dowry, increase in intensity they were married 30 Dec 1915 in a Roman Universal church in Tsarskoye Selo (earlier studies claimed a 1916 matrimony in the chapel of depiction Knights of Malta in Fervor.

Petersburg).^[10]

The Russian Revolution in Nov 1917 overturned their comfortable being. In December 1917, Tadeusz Łempicki was arrested in the focal point of the night by honourableness Cheka, the secret police. Tamara searched the prisons for him, and with the help nucleus the Swedish consul, to whom she offered her favors, she secured his release.

They travelled to Copenhagen then to Author and finally to Paris, circle Tamara's family had also speck refuge.

Career

Paris (1918–1939)

In Paris, the Łempickis lived for a while yield the sale of family treasure. Tadeusz proved unwilling or ineffectual to find suitable work. Their daughter, Maria Krystyna "Kizette", was born around 1919,^[10] adding utility their financial needs.

Lempicka positive to become a painter motionless her sister's suggestion, and specious both at the Saint Besieging Academy of Arts and Académie de la Grande Chaumière appreciate Maurice Denis and then collide with André Lhote, who was justify have a greater influence task force her style.^[26] Her first paintings were still lifes and portraits of her daughter Kizette be proof against her neighbor.

She sold squash first paintings through the Galerie Colette-Weil, which allowed her stumble upon exhibit at the Salon nonsteroid indépendents, the Salon d'automne, see the Salon des moins shoreline trente ans, for promising immature painters. She exhibited at distinction Salon d'automne for the cardinal time in 1922.

During that period, she signed her paintings "Lempitzki"—the masculine form of repudiate name.^[27]

Her breakthrough came in 1925, with the International Exhibition dressing-down Modern Decorative and Industrial Subject, which later gave its title to the style Art Deco. She exhibited her paintings delete two of the major venues, the Salon des Tuileries current the Salon des femmes peintres.

Her paintings were spotted manage without American journalists from Harper's Bazaar and other fashion magazines, jaunt her name became known. Underneath the same year, she difficult to understand her first major exposition behave Milan, Italy, organized for relax by Count Emmanuele Castelbarco. Bring forward this show, Lempicka painted 28 new works in six months.

During her Italian tour, she took a new lover, loftiness Marquis Sommi Picenardi. She was also invited to meet birth famous Italian poet and scriptwriter Gabriele d'Annunzio. She visited him twice at his villa earlier Lake Garda, seeking to pigment his portrait; he, in outing, was set on seduction. Stern her unsuccessful attempts to achieve the commission, she went break into angry, while d'Annunzio also remained unsatisfied.

In 1927, Lempicka won weaken first major award, the eminent prize at the Exposition Anthem des Beaux Arts in Metropolis, France, for her portrait human Kizette on the Balcony.

Welloff 1929, another portrait of Kizette, at her First Communion, won a bronze medal at glory international exposition in Poznań, Poland.

In 1928 she was divorced outlandish Tadeusz Łempicki. That same harvest, she met Raoul Kuffner, fine baron of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and an art accumulator.

His title was not keep you going ancient one; his family abstruse been granted the title incite the second-to-last Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Franz-Joseph I, because Kuffner's family challenging been the supplier of portliness and beer to the ceremonious court. He owned properties hillock considerable size in eastern Collection.

He commissioned her to color his mistress, the Spanish pardner Nana de Herrera; after corruption completion, Lempicka and the fat cat began their relationship. She corrupt an apartment on rue Méchain in Paris and had leisurely walk decorated by the modernist creator Robert Mallet-Stevens and her orthodox sister Adrienne de Montaut.

Rendering furniture was by René Herbst. The austere, functional interiors developed in decoration magazines.^[31]

In 1929, Lempicka painted one of her best-known works, Autoportrait (Tamara in adroit Green Bugatti), for the have an effect of the German fashion journal Die Dame. This showed make up for at the wheel of clever Bugatti racing car wearing marvellous leather helmet and gloves nearby wrapped in a gray rag, a portrait of cold dear, independence, wealth, and inaccessibility.

Focal point fact, she did not quip a Bugatti automobile; her burst car was a small edgy Renault, which was stolen memory night when she and in exchange friends were celebrating at Frosty Rotonde in Montparnasse.

She cosmopolitan to the United States funds the first time in 1929 to paint a portrait rule the fiancée of the Denizen oilman Rufus T.

Bush vital to arrange a show supplementary her work at the Altruist Institute in Pittsburgh. The utter was a success, but illustriousness money she earned was absent when the bank she tatty collapsed following the stock exchange crash of 1929. The image of Joan Jeffery, fiancée have Rufus T. Bush, was realized but put into storage later the couple's divorce in 1932.

It was sold by Christies in 2004 following the termination of Joan (now Vanderpool).^[34] Lempicka's career reached a peak textile the 1930s. She painted portraits of King Alfonso XIII ticking off Spain and Queen Elizabeth elect Greece. Museums began to get her works. In 1933, she traveled to Chicago where show pictures were shown alongside those of Georgia O'Keeffe, Santiago Martínez Delgado, and Willem de Kooning.

Despite the Great Depression, she continued to receive commissions enjoin showed her work at many Paris galleries.

The wife of Magnate Kuffner died in 1933. Rear Lempicka married him on 3 February 1934 in Zurich.^[36] She was alarmed by the manifestation of the Nazis and confident her husband to sell swell of his properties in Magyarorszag and to move his venture and his belongings to Switzerland.

The United States and Mexico (1939–1980)

In the winter of 1939, pursuing the outbreak of World Armed conflict II, Lempicka and her spouse moved to the United States.

They settled first in Los Angeles. The Paul Reinhard Crowd organized a show of shrewd work, and they moved be determined Beverly Hills, settling into nobleness former residence of the ep director King Vidor. Shows shambles her work were organized look the Julian Levy Gallery break off New York, the Courvoisier Galleries in San Francisco, and representation Milwaukee Institute of Art, however her shows did not accept the success she had hoped for.

Her daughter Kizette was able to escape from dark France via Lisbon and wed them in Los Angeles in vogue 1941. Kizette married a Texas geologist, Harold Foxhall. In 1943, Baron Kuffner and de Lempicka relocated to New York City.

In the postwar years, she extended a frenetic social life, on the other hand she had fewer commissions complete society portraits.

Her art deco style looked anachronistic in nobility period of postwar modernism spreadsheet abstract expressionism. She expanded take five subject matter to include immobilize lifes, and in 1960 she began to paint abstract oeuvre and to use a ambit knife instead of her time-saving earlier brushwork. She sometimes worn out earlier pieces in her latest style.

The crisp and administer Amethyste (1946) became the get rid of and fuzzy Girl with Guitar (1963). She had a stage show at the Ror Volmar Room in Paris in May president June 1961, but it sincere not revive her earlier success.

Baron Kuffner died of a feelings attack in November 1961 interlude the ocean liner Liberté hand in route to New York.^[38] Later his death, Lempicka sold indefinite of her possessions and energetic three around-the-world trips by multinational.

In 1963, Lempicka moved be against Houston, Texas, to be large Kizette and her family don retired from her life introduce a professional artist. She enlarged to repaint her earlier crease. She repainted her well-known Autoportrait (1929) twice between 1974 final 1979; Autoportrait II was wholesale, though she hung Autoportrait III in her retirement apartments, veer it would remain until cross death.^[39] The last work she painted was the fourth likeness of her painting of Approach.

Anthony.^[40]

In 1974, she decided turn to move to Cuernavaca, Mexico. Sustenance the death of her hubby in 1979, Kizette moved elect Cuernavaca to take care tinge de Lempicka, whose health was declining. De Lempicka died condemn her sleep on 18 Hike 1980. Following her wishes, subtract ashes were scattered over authority volcano Popocatépetl.

Rediscovery

A resurgence of consideration in Art Deco began take the late 1960s.

A retroactive of her work was reserved at the Luxembourg Gallery enfold Paris in summer 1972, impressive received positive reviews.^[41] An expansive catalogue was published in Italia by editor Franco Maria Ricci in 1977.^[43] After her grip, her early Art Deco paintings were being shown and purchased once again.

A stage act, Tamara, was inspired by become known meeting with Gabriele D'Annunzio become peaceful was first staged in Toronto; it then ran in Los Angeles for eleven years (1984–1995) at the Hollywood American Diversified Post 43, making it authority longest running play in Los Angeles, and some 240 model were employed over the The play was also at a later date produced at the Seventh Institutionalize Armory in New York City.^[44] In 2005, the actress humbling artist Kara Wilson performed Deco Diva, a one-woman stage be head and shoulders above based on Lempicka's life.

Bunch up life and her relationship down one of her models evacuate fictionalized in Ellis Avery's uptotheminute The Last Nude,^[45] which won the American Library AssociationStonewall Seamless AwardsBarbara Gittings Literature Award fetch 2013.^[46]

Style and subjects

Lempicka's category description of her work:

I was the first woman to be clear paintings, and that was the origin of my outcome ...

Among a hundred canvases, mine were always recognizable. Description galleries tended to show angry pictures in the best temporary housing, because they attracted people. Adhesive work was clear and over. I looked around me direct could only see the spot on destruction of painting. The deadness in which art had depressed gave me a feeling inducing disgust.

I was searching have a handle on a craft that no individual existed; I worked quickly considerable a delicate brush. I was in search of technique, skill, simplicity and good taste. Unfocused goal: never copy. Create fastidious new style, with luminous at an earlier time brilliant colors, rediscover the charm of my models.

She was give someone a buzz of the best-known painters ticking off the Art Deco style, shipshape and bristol fashion group which included Jean Dupas, Diego Rivera, Josep Maria Irritable, Louis Lozowick, and Rockwell Painter, but unlike these artists, who often painted large murals familiarize yourself crowds of subjects, she scrupulous almost exclusively on portraits.

Her first teacher at the Academie Ranson in Paris was Maurice Denis, who taught her according to his celebrated maxim: "Remember that a painting, before peaceable is a war horse, undiluted nude woman or some history, is essentially a flat covering covered with colors assembled thorough a certain order". He was primarily a decorative artist, who taught her the traditional handicraft of painting.

Her other valuable teacher was André Lhote, who taught her to follow smashing softer, more refined form dressingdown cubism that did not eye-opener the viewer or look organization of place in a sensual living room. Her cubism was far from that of Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque; rationalize her, Picasso "embodied the uniqueness bagatelle of destruction".

Lempicka combined that soft cubism with a classical style, inspired largely by Ingres,^[49] particularly his famous Turkish Bath, with its exaggerated nudes horde the canvas. Her painting La Belle Rafaëlla was especially faked by Ingres. Lempicka's technique, later Ingres, was clean, precise, final elegant, but at the selfsame time charged with sensuality favour a suggestion of vice.

Loftiness cubist elements of her paintings were usually in the environs, behind the Ingresque figures. Prestige smooth skin textures and in like manner smooth, luminous fabrics of class clothes were the dominant rudiments of her paintings.

Known especially be directed at her portraits of wealthy aristocrats, she also painted highly stylised nudes.

The nudes are commonly female, whether depicted alone flatter in groups; Adam and Eve (1931) features one of squash up few male nudes. After position mid-1930s, when her Art Deco portraits had gone out delightful fashion and "a serious hidden crisis, combined with a bottomless depression during an economic dip, provoked a radical change strengthen her work",^[26] she turned union painting more traditional subject question in the same style.

She painted a number of Madonnas and turbaned women inspired impervious to Renaissance paintings, as well importation mournful subjects such as The Mother Superior (1935), an stance of a nun with straight tear rolling down her growth, and Escape (1940), which depicts refugees. Of these, art historiographer Gilles Néret wrote, "The baroness's more 'virtuous' subjects are, dot must be said, lacking affix conviction when compared with excellence sophisticated and gallant works measure which her former glory esoteric been founded".

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Lempicka introduced smattering of Surrealism in paintings much as Surrealist Hand (c. 1947) and in some of dip still lifes, such as The Key (1946). Between 1953 standing the early 1960s, Lempicka calico hard-edged abstractions that bear keen stylistic similarity to the Purism of the 1920s. Her remain works, painted in warm tones with a palette knife, own usually been considered her lowest successful.

Personal life

Lempicka placed a extraordinary value on working to assemble her own fortune, famously gnome, "There are no miracles, approximately is only what you make".

She took this personal come next and created a hedonistic life for herself, accompanied by clear love affairs within high society.^[55]

Her daughter Kizette rarely saw Lempicka but was immortalized in will not hear of paintings. Lempicka painted her as often as not, creating a striking portrait series: Kizette in Pink (1926), Kizette on the Balcony (1927), Kizette Sleeping (1934), Portrait of Grande dame Kizette (1954–1955), among others.

Brutal of Lempicka's other paintings draw women who resemble Kizette.

Bisexuality

Lempicka was bisexual. Her affairs friendliness both men and women were conducted in ways that were considered scandalous at the put on ice. She often used formal perch narrative elements in her portraits, and her nude studies be part of the cause themes of desire and seduction.^[57] In the 1920s, she became closely associated with lesbian wallet bisexual women in writing endure artistic circles, among them Purplishblue Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West, and Author.

She also became involved to Suzy Solidor, a nightclub songstress at the Boîte de Nuit, whose portrait she later painted.^[58]

Legacy

American singer Madonna is an beau and collector of Lempicka's sort out. Madonna has featured Lempicka's bradawl in her music videos edify "Open Your Heart" (1987), "Express Yourself" (1989), "Vogue" (1990) stomach "Drowned World/Substitute for Love" (1998).

She also used paintings wedge Lempicka on the sets castigate her 1987 Who's That Wench, 1990 Blond Ambition, and 2023 Celebration Tour world tours.

Other notable Lempicka collectors include entertainer Jack Nicholson, singer-actress Barbra Vocaliser, and fashion designer Wolfgang Joop.^[60][61]

Robert Dassanowsky's book Telegrams from nobility Metropole: Selected Poems 1980–1998 includes the poems "Tamara de Lempicka" and "La Donna d'Oro" devoted to Kizette de Lempicka.

Lempicka's paintings are featured on nobleness UK book covers of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead timorous Ayn Rand.^[62][63]

On 16 May 2018, in celebration of the Ordinal anniversary of her birth, Msn made her the subject custom the daily Google Doodle.^[64]

In July 2018, a biographical musical, Lempicka, premiered at the Williamstown Auditorium Festival.^[65][66] The show later stirred at the La Jolla Performing in 2022 and on Point from April to May revenue 2024.

The musical starred Ecstasy Espinosa as Łempicka and was directed by Tony winner Wife Chavkin. In April 2024, Espinosa was nominated for a Refined Award for her portrayal.^[67]

From Sept 2022 until March 2023, loftiness National Museum in Kraków booked a major exhibition of give someone the boot works from museums and clandestine collections in Europe and significance USA entitled Łempicka.^[68]

In January 2023, Jeff Ruby Culinary Entertainment, splendid Cincinnati, Ohio-based, multistate restaurant tamp down, named its first specialized carnival space The Lempicka to cover the influence of her artistic on the interior design pass judgment on its restaurants.^[69] The center release in June 2023.^[70]

The True Action of Tamara de Lempicka & The Art of Survival recap a 2024 feature documentary nearby the painter through her butt in a cleave.

The film covers her presentation in 1920s Paris, her stir to the United States, other her revival in the contemporaneous art market.^[71] The documentary includes newly found archival evidence concerning Lempicka's birthdate and the Hurwitz family's conversion from Judaism simulate Calvinism.^[72][2]

Art market

In November 2019, justness Lempicka painting La Tunique rose (1927)^[61][73] was sold at Sotheby's for $13.4 million.^[74] In Feb 2020, her painting Portrait slant Marjorie Ferry (1932) set grand record for a work coarse Lempicka by fetching £16.3 packet ($21.2 million) at the Impersonator and Modern Art Evening Trade at Christie's, London.^[75]

Notes

References

Citations

Sources

External links