An icon of the Jazz Age, Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka lived a life well worth recording. Until now, however, no one has written the story of this woman of extraordinary talent and notoriety. She was a great beauty, an aristocratic refugee of the Russian Revolution, and a frankly erotic painter who insisted upon Renaissance aesthetics, figuration, and painterly craft in modern art. The sky-high prices attached to her canvases in recent years have still not dispelled the suspicions that a woman of Lempicka's glamour and fame could be a truly serious artist. Yet the reviews of the early twentieth century tell a different story: her work was routinely singled out as competing with major figures of the School of Paris, including Léger, Laurençin, Kisling, and Picasso. In this first critical biography, Laura Claridge draws upon her exclusive access to Lempicka's family, friends, and archives to re-create the life that the painter carefully withheld even from her own daughter: the truth of her birth; her escape from Bolshevik Russia; her determination to become a New Woman; her lifelong bouts of depression; her numerous affairs with the women and men she painted; her flight from Nazi Europe via Havana; and her years in Hollywood and New York as the "Baroness with a brush," all informed by the artistic integrity and social anachronism that condemned her to being written out of the canons of modern art. Emblematic of '20s excess and indulgence, Tamara de Lempicka's life of great wealth, indiscriminate sexuality, and endless intrigue makes for a fascinating narrative. But her paintings have inspired fierce disagreements over issues of class, wealth, and gender in modern art, making her work ripe for critical re-evaluation. In Tamara de Lempicka: A Life of Deco and Decadence, Laura Claridge has succeeded brilliantly on both counts, bringing to light the contradictions that fueled the life and work of this provocative painter. Though Paris in the early twenties certainly earned its bohemian reputation, Tamara was playing the game hard by anyone's standards. It seemed to her that she could have it all: respect, money, and sexual gratification on the side. She had arrived at the Gare du Nord only four years earlier, gifted with a painter's talent and a family history of feminine power. Encountering a cultural climate that affirmed art as a remunerative career for women, she also felt freed personally by the Modernist mantra to "make it new" that underwrote every aspect--trivial and profound--of daily life. She was determined to embody that icon of the age, the new woman.

A landmark retrospective on the Art Deco painter exploring her intersectional identities Tamara de Lempicka (1894-1980), the "Baroness with a Brush," is often cast as one of Art Deco's most celebrated artists, though her work transcends categorization, incorporating elements of Cubism and Neoclassicism in a distinctive, sensuous blend of form and function. Lempicka's paintings, including a self-portrait as the driver of a sleek green Bugatti, often depict dazzling, self-assured women, exuding elegance and transgressive sexuality while combining the modern with the classical. This gorgeous survey presents the full arc of Lempicka's career in the context of her life and her evolving identity, including her Polish and Russian origins, her marriages and other relationships, and her time in France, Italy, and the United States. This book unfolds chronologically through three sections that mark the stages of the artist's life and the evolution of her artistic style, with particular focus on her Jewish heritage, her expression of gender, and her sexuality. Published in association with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Exhibition schedule: Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (October 12, 2024-February 9, 2025) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (March 9-May 26, 2025)

Tamara de Lempicka, a beautiful and provocative artist, was a star of the period between the great wars, an iconic symbol of the era. This is a monograph of the artist and her work.

Catalogus bij een tentoonstelling van werk - vooral uit de periode 1922-1935 - van de wat in vergetelheid geraakte art deco kunstenares (1898-1980).

An aura of mystery has surrounded Tamara de Lempicka since she was born, not in Warsaw in 1902, as she claimed, but according to official records in 1898 in Moscow. The beautiful and scandalous Tamara was the extravagant muse of Art Deco, an icon of the roaring twenties, and a successful painter of intensely sensual portraits that were powerfully sculptural with Cubist lines, embellished with sophisticated decorative elements. Cool colors, cramped spaces and stark contrasts between light and shade surround the unforgettable faces of rich, elegant, emancipated, and theatrical women fixed in their existential melancholy. The catalogue includes a careful selection of unforgettable paintings and valuable historic photographs offering us a fascinating thematic reconstruction of the personal and professional aspects of Tamara's life, including the places she lived, her involvement in the sophisticated fashion world of the period, and her studies of the nude, as well as her still-lifes and portraits. Contents: Tamara's worlds: from Russia to Mexico; Still life - a recurring theme in Lempicka's work, with echoes and references that range from 17th-century Flemish painting, to the rediscovery of trompe-l'oeil in the 1930s to1950s, and contemporary photography; Devotion - a constant theme in Lempicka's oeuvre is religious. It is identified and analyzed in terms of the art of the period. Portraits - Paintings and drawings are analyzed, and the initial classical sources pointed up, as well as how they relate to modern photography and cinematography. A section is dedicated to the portraits of children; The nude - The study of the nude from mannerist sources to the photography of Albin-Guillot e Brassaï; Fashion - Lempicka's close ties to the fashion world examined through her paintings, her experience as a photographic model, and her sophisticated wardrobe. Published to accompany an exhibition at Palazzo Chiablese, Turin (19 March - 30 August 2015).

Agreeing to model nude for Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka in 1927 Paris, young American Rafaela Fano inspires the artist's most iconic Jazz Age images and becomes her lover while discovering darker truths about Tamara's private life.