Tamara de Lempicka

Tamara de Lempicka, a white woman with short wavy hair and heavy 20s style makeup, paints a portrait.

"I live life in the margins of society, and the rules of normal society don't apply to those who live on the fringe. "

– Tamara de Lempicka

Tamara de Lempicka was a highly controversial artist. A bisexual woman was made a refugee twice in her life, first by the Bolsheviks, then later by the Nazis, she was called bourgeois while simultaneously being poor, and a failure of an artist in the midst of her success. A contradiction of a woman, de Lempicka’s work remains iconic all over the world.

Tamara de Lempicka was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1898 to a wealthy family. Her father was a Jewish man, and her mother was a wealthy Russian woman. When Tamara was sixteen years old, she married Tadeusz Lempicki, who married her for her significant dowry, as he was a poor lawyer who could barely support himself. This was only the beginning of her troubles. In 1917, when the Russian Revolution began, her family fled the country while Tamara and her husband stayed. Within the year, their home was invaded by the Bolsheviks in the middle of the night when Tamara and her husband were having sex. Tamara’s husband was arrested, and her home was ransacked.

“Tadeusz was arrested by the Bolsheviks, and Tamara braved the Russian Revolution to free him, using her good looks to charm favors from the necessary officials.” – Charles Moffat Art History Archive

“Lempicki was arrested by the Bolsheviks, but his wife secured his release.” – Fiona MacCarthy The Guardian

“[She]searched the prisons for him and after several weeks, with the help of the Swedish consul, she secured his release.” – Wikipedia

Now take a moment to think what exactly this implied she did. One might conjure up a picture of a charming young woman walking into the Swedish Consul and demanding their help to get her husband out of jail, perhaps flirting with a couple of the necessary people to get them to help her. Now, what happened was this nineteen-year-old woman who had just had to watch her husband be arrested in the middle of the night, and was desperate to find him, had to have sex with Swedish officials to secure his freedom.

Adult officials encountered this young woman looking for her husband and decided they would only give her help if she had sex with them.

When publications do not describe this encounter in its full reality, they are very directly misinforming their readers and not pointing out the grave injustice this woman was forced to endure.

After this traumatic incident, Tamara took her husband and ran to Copenhagen, then London, before settling in Paris. When she came to Paris, she had no money, and her husband refused to work. In Paris, she had a daughter, so she sold all her jewels and began painting for commissions. It is in this decision that she receives the most criticism. At the time, the art scene was filled with middle-class men who would pretend they were poor so that they could scoff at the upper class, and to them Tamara was bourgeois. A young woman trying to keep herself, her husband, and her daughter from starving was much too rich for their blood, so they mocked her for working for rich people.

She ignored them and kept working until she became rich. Working twelve hours each day on her art, and still as she entered the spotlight, critics called her frivolous, and still do to this day. Outside of her work, she enjoyed her new wealth; she partied and surrounded herself with celebrities, sleeping with many of them regardless of gender and enjoying her life.

As she earned enough money to be more than supplied for a while, all the while keeping her daughter taken care of, she worked on more personal projects. This included portraits of many queer people, focusing on women being with women, which many critics disavowed her for. But beyond painting queer people in a positive light, quite literally, she also painted women as strong and independent people, and her models had a wide variety of body types and gender expressions.

But as World War II began, things changed drastically for Tamara. She saw the war coming far sooner than many others around her, and eventually when she attempted to return to Paris, she was forced out because she was Jewish.

She was surrounded by anti-Semitism. Though she had secured herself a wealthy second husband and moved to America after her first had left her for all her affairs (though he reportedly also had a few of his own), her life and work were affected deeply by it. She worked on war relief efforts, though she is rarely credited for doing so, and was just able to get her daughter out of Nazi-occupied Paris. She slowly changed her paintings' subjects to include refugees and poor people and was rejected harshly by critics for doing so.

They claimed she was out of touch and didn’t understand the plight of these groups, not acknowledging that she had in her life been both for a time. After a particularly harsh reception of her work after an exhibit, she stopped painting entirely.

Regardless of the reasons, soon after her husband died of a heart attack, she sold all of her possessions and moved to Texas with her daughter, where the two stayed for a significant amount of time. Much later in her life, she was able to see a new generation discover her art. Fans again overwhelmed the critics, and her work became popular again. She died in her sleep in 1980 with enough time to see people grow to love her again.

Her story ended happily, and there is something to be said for that, but her story is not often told as a happy one.

Tamara was a woman, a bisexual woman who earned her living and didn’t pretend she didn’t want to be rich. She was a woman who was victimized by the Bolsheviks and lived as a poor refugee for a significant portion of her life, so when people call her materialistic, it is particularly cruel.

While she was not like the men the art scene was filled with, who pretended that earning money was something no one should ever aspire to do and that taking commissions was the height of betrayal of one’s craft, she was not an awful person. She never committed an atrocious crime and seems to have mostly just wanted to paint and party. Most depictions portray her as shallow, cruel, and downright villainous for enjoying these things.

The reason for this is obvious: Tamara was a woman. When people look at a man being rich and loving beautiful things, they say he has good taste. When a woman does the same, they say she is shallow. It is sexism, plain and simple. No matter what Tamara did, she was criticized harshly for it, which most women are very familiar with. She worked twelve hours a day, and people called her lazy. She worked her way out of poverty, and people called her aristocratic. She had relationships with people from various backgrounds and body types, and people called her shallow. She had a difficult life filled with turmoil, and she was called spoilt. Tamara deserved better, and her legacy deserves more than what the patriarchy has made it.

Tamara was not a perfect person. She was raised with an enormous amount of privilege, though it was stripped away later in her life before she fought to get it back. But that’s not what upset people. Tamara was a woman, and she was a woman who did not need men. She liked men, she married two of them, but she did not need them and never pretended she did. She made her own money from her work, she supported herself and her daughter, and she enjoyed her life even when critics were writing scathing reviews of her work.

One of her most famous pieces is called “Autoportrait (Tamara in Green Bugatti),” and it is a painting of her alone, staring back at the audience, in a car that is a reflection of her wealth. It is often commented that she seems at the height of independence in it.

She is strong and challenging and in control, and that is a terrifying thing for a woman to be. She challenged the roles of gender on many different levels and was rebuffed each time harshly. When she reached success, she was painted as a Marie Antoinette-like figure.

Consider F. Scott Fitzgerald. He's a prime example of a man living in excess and not caring about much but his own life. He arguably was a bad person, emotionally abusing his wife the entire time they were together, but Tamara is the one people look to and cringe at the memory of. Though the queer community has a wide variety of gender identities, it is important to recognize that the women in our community, cisgender or transgender, face another host of challenges in addition to the discrimination they face for being queer. The queer community’s job is to look after one of its own and demand that her story be painted as a full picture.

[Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material]

Brady, H. (2013, August 15). The Raucous Life of Tama de Lempicka: An Art Deco Icon. The Culture Trip. Retrieved from https://theculturetrip.com/europe/poland/articles/art-deco-icon-the-alluring-mystique-of-tamara-de-lempicka/

Catharina, A. (2012, February 2). Art Attack! Tamara de Lempicka Didn´t Care Who Knew. Autostraddle. Retrieved from https://www.autostraddle.com/art-attack-spotlight-tamara-de-lempicka-134087/

Charlish, R. Art Deco Icon: Tamara de Lempicka. Royal Academy. Retrieved from http://www.culturewars.org.uk/2004-02/lempicka.htm

MacCarthy, S. (2004, May 15). The Good Old Naughty Days. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/may/15/art

Moffat, C. (2008). Tamara de Lempicka. The Art History Archive. Retrieved from http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/artdeco/Tamara-De-Lempicka.html

Varieras, C. (2015, April 6). Tamara de Lempicka, Worldly Deco Diva, underrated master of the roaring twenties [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiWKU0oo2t0