Tamarta Łempicka was born in 1898 in Warsaw as Maria Gurwik-Górska. Shortly after her marriage, she moved to Paris with her husband, the Polish lawyer Tadeusz Łempicki. There she began to paint, studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and selling her first works in Parisian galleries.

It didn’t take long for her to become the most fashionable portraitist in the city, with an enormous amount of commissions. Her style was a blend of late, refined cubism and the neoclassical style, particularly inspired by the work of Jean-Dominique Ingres.

She was an active participant in the artistic and social life of Paris during the interwar period. In 1928, she became the mistress of Baron Raoul Kuffner, a wealthy art collector from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. 

After the death of his wife in 1933, the Baron married Łempicka in 1934, and thereafter she became known in the press as „The Baroness with a Brush”.

Following the outbreak of World War II in 1939, she and her husband moved to the United States. She lived successively in Los Angeles, New York and Houston. She continued painting celebrity portraits, as well as still lives and even some abstract paintings. 

Her work was out of fashion after World War II, but made a comeback in the late 1960s, with the rediscovery of Art Deco. She remains is best known for her polished Art-Deco portraits of aristocrats and the wealthy, and for her highly stylized paintings of nudes.

One of Łempicka’s most famous paintings, „Portrait of Marjorie Ferry”, was sold on the 5th of February 2020 at the „Impressionist and Modern Art” auction at Christie’s London auction house. 

The work was created in 1932 in the artist’s studio in Paris and is the most expensive-selling painting by a Polish artist in history. It was sold for £16,280 million. 

Image: Twitter @ArtistLempicka

Author: Sébastien Meuwissen