TAMARA DE Lempicka came from a Polish upper-class
family, which gave her an excellent all-round international education.
In 1918 she and her Russian husband fled the Russian Revolution to
Paris.
Here Lempicka came under the influence of the
avant-garde artists, notably Fernand Leger. However, the painter whose
work most impressed her and whose style is reflected in her own female
nudes was Paul Cezanne, then near the end of his long career.
Lempicka became one of the most fashionable
portrait painters in Paris in the interwar period, her work emphasizing
the glamour and ostentatious wealth of her patrons, idealizing their
beauty and elegance.
The other side of Lempicka, however, was her
homosexuality – which was reflected in her extraordinary studies
of female nudes, always fully representational (and often devastatingly
so) yet with overtones of Cubism in the use of simplified anatomy and
the geometric patterns of the background. The result was electrifying
and highly distinctive.
Excerpt from Art. The World of Art, from
Aboriginal to American Pop, Renaissance Masters to Postmodernism.
