ART ESCAPE

Tamara de Lempicka, born in Warsaw 1898, died 1980, born into a wealthy and prominent family. 

Her first paintings captured the Art Deco atmosphere with paintings of the upper classes and also nude drawings living up to the erotic desires of the 1920s.

She thought that many of the impressionists drew badly and employed "dirty" colors. De Lempicka's technique would be novel, clean, precise, and elegant.

In 1960 she changed her style to abstract art and began creating works with a spatula. In 1925, she painted her iconic work Auto-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) for the cover of the German fashion magazine Die Dame, as summed up by the magazine Auto-Journal in 1974, the self-portrait of Tamara de Lempicka is a real image of the independent woman who asserts herself. Her hands are gloved, she is helmeted, and inaccessible; a cold and disturbing beauty through which pierces a formidable being….this woman is free! De Lempicka won her first major award in 1927, first prize at the Exposition Internationale de Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, France for her portrait of her daughter “ Kizette on the Balcony.” Obsessed with her work and her social life, de Lempicka neglected  her husband and rarely saw her daughter, when Kizette was not away at boarding school in France or England the girl was often with her grandmother Malvina. Kizette was neglected, but also immortalized. De Lempicka painted her only child repeatedly, leaving a striking portrait series - Kizette in Pink, 1926; Kizette on the Balcony, 1927; Kizette Sleeping, 1934; Portrait of Baroness Kizette, 1954–5, etc. In other paintings the women depicted tend to resemble Kizette.

In 1980, while living in Mexico , Tamara died in her sleep. Her daughter Kizette scattered her ashes over the crater of Mt. Popocatépt. (Christine Morison)