Tamara de Lempika

Tamara de Lempika 1898-1980 born in Warsaw [Poland] and then lived in Russia fled the revolution moving to France where she started painting c. 1918. This was to support herself and her child. A pupil of Maurice Denis & Andre Lhote. She became the most fashionable portrait painter of the 1920' & 1930's by connecting with the trends & capturing the mood of that time. She had an elegant style with that decadent spirit of those times producing some 100 portraits. these distinctive portraits tend to resemble the close-cropped photographic portraits of that time. That often tightly frame just the upper body depicting it as a simplified figure. The figures are both stylized and enigmatic at the same time. This is usually contrasted by a complex densely packed angular background, bordering on the surreal. The relationship between light & space as paintings depicting a heartless elegance combined with an icy social appeal to the wealthy of that time. She became the celebrity artist of the time commanding high prices for her work. Her art capturing the superficiality, the sophistication and the decadence of the high society in the Art Deco world. A time of emergent liberation which she succeeded in immortalising . Her palette was bold bright and colourful, almost surreal tool. In the 1940's moving to Texas and continued painting the stars of the time. A reputation as on of the finest Art Deco painters. But her central figures were curvaceous, soft, erotic, often naked females arranged in sensual, even suggestive poses but the personality or the emotions of the sitter are rarely evident. Perhaps see http://www.goodart.org/artoftdl.htm