Tamara de Lempicka — painter with roots in the Russian Empire
Almost every basic fact about her early life is contested, and most of the confusion is her own work. She gave her birth year variously as 1898 and 1905; a baptismal record found by scholars gives 16 June 1894. She said she had been born in Warsaw, and sometimes in Saint Petersburg; some researchers now think Moscow. The family name appears as Gorska, Gurwik-Gorska and Dekler depending on the document. She is the third subject in this archive, after Yul Brynner and Romain Gary, whose own account of their origins is the least reliable one available.
What is not in doubt is the shape of it. Her father Boris was a lawyer, her mother Malwina Decler a Polish socialite, and the family was wealthy. Her grandmother Klementyna took her to Venice, Florence and Rome as a girl, which is where the Italian Renaissance entered her painting. She was at boarding school in Lausanne.
In 1911, at a masked ball in Saint Petersburg given by her aunt Stefania Stifter - she went dressed as a peasant girl leading a goose on a string - she met the Polish lawyer Tadeusz Lempicki. By 1914 she had moved to Saint Petersburg to live with the Stifters, who were rich and moved in circles close to the imperial court. She married Lempicki there in 1916, in her own account at the chapel of the Knights of Malta.
The revolution ended that life. Lempicki was taken from their home at night by the Cheka. She searched the prisons for him for weeks and got him out; accounts of how differ sharply, some crediting the Swedish consul and the family's own chronology crediting relatives' contacts. The couple left by way of Copenhagen and London for Paris, where much of her family and a large part of the Russian upper class had already arrived.
In Paris they lived by selling the family jewellery. Her husband did not find work. Her sister Adrienne, who was training as an architect, told her to get a profession rather than depend on him, and she enrolled at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, studying under Maurice Denis and Andre Lhote.
What she made of it was one of the defining visual styles of the century: a hard, polished fusion of late cubism with neoclassical form, owing a great deal to Ingres, applied mostly to portraits of the rich. She exhibited first at the Salon d'Automne in 1922, took first prize at Bordeaux in 1927 for a portrait of her daughter Kizette, and painted in 1929 the self-portrait in a green Bugatti that remains the single most reproduced image of the Art Deco years.
She divorced Lempicki in 1928 and in 1934 married Baron Raoul Kuffner, an art collector whose family had been ennobled for supplying beef and beer to the Austro-Hungarian court, after which the press called her the baroness with a brush. She left Europe before the Second World War, worked in the United States, and died at Cuernavaca in Mexico in March 1980.
"Left Petrograd after her husband's arrest; Copenhagen and London, then Paris"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Warsaw / Moscow
Her husband Tadeusz Lempicki was arrested at night by the Cheka after the revolution. She obtained his release - accounts of how differ - and the couple left via Copenhagen and London for Paris, where a large part of the Russian emigration had gathered.
Born into a wealthy Polish family of the Russian Empire - father Boris Gurwik-Gorski, a lawyer, mother Malwina Decler. Sources give her birth as Warsaw, Saint Petersburg or Moscow, and her birth year as 1894, 1898 or 1905; a baptismal record supports 16 June 1894. She moved to Saint Petersburg in 1914 to live with her aunt's family, who moved in circles close to the imperial court.
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Warsaw / Moscow. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.