Tamara de Lempicka

Origins and early life

Tamara de Lempicka was born on 16 May 1894, in Warsaw or in Moscow according to divergent sources, to two parents who were both born Jewish: her father, Boris or Benno Wilhelm Hurwitz, known as Gurwik-Górski, a Russian Jewish lawyer and businessman, and her mother, Malwina Gabryela Dekler, of Polish Jewish origin. This fiche states plainly that the family had left Judaism before her birth: a conversion register found in Russian archives and published by Polish researchers in 2025 shows that both parents were baptised into the Reformed congregation of Warsaw in 1891, three years before Tamara was born, and that Tamara and her two siblings were baptised in the Reformed church of Moscow in 1897.

She grew up in wealth, married the lawyer Tadeusz Łempicki in Saint Petersburg in 1916, and fled the Russian Revolution for Paris in 1918 after her husband was arrested by the Cheka and she obtained his release.

Work and career

In Paris she studied with Maurice Denis and André Lhote and built a style of her own: hard, sculptural, metallic portraits of the new European society, women in silk and steel, that became the visual signature of Art Deco. Her Self-Portrait in a Green Bugatti of 1929 and her portraits of the Duchess de La Salle and of her daughter Kizette are among the emblems of the period. She moved to the United States in 1939 as war approached, fell out of fashion after the war, and was rediscovered in the 1970s. She died at Cuernavaca on 18 March 1980, and her ashes were scattered over the volcano Popocatépetl.