Once I realised that my life was painting, I looked keenly at that universe,
wishing so much to become a part of it. It was a universe studded with male names, exquisitely
male names. The painting panorama had two great names of illustrious men who had made the history of painting. But no equally special woman among them.
I got down to some research, and behind those great names, in the undergrowth I might say, I found also women. Not one, not ten, but a thousand paintresses.
Ah, what joy! And what anger to realise we have been pushed aside, belittled, shut in, owing to the idea that painting was a "job not suited to a woman","something not quite right for a woman".
Aertemisia Gentileschi, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassat, Leonora and Dora Carrington, Gabriele
Munter, Marianne Werefkin, Camille Claudel are only some of the numerous artistic existences
brushed aside -because they were women.Tamara also now numbers among the names of female painters.
Born in Warsaw, at the end of 1800, she exhibited, as a girl, an exuberant and intelligent personality
which led her, in 1907, to feign illness in order to reach her grandmother at Mentone. Here
she began to paint on rocks. In 1910 she gives further proof of her mettle, producing a portrait of her sister just to demostrate to a professional painter that she was better than him.
Then, the meeting with her future husband Tadeusz Lempicka was characterised by a playful and eccentric atmosphere:When the two young people met at a masked ball, Tamara was dressed as a Polish peasant, bringing with her a goose on a lead!The marriage with the young lawyer Tadeuz Lempicka guaranteed a leisured life.
Tamara loves life, parties and courtship but the October Revolution is a mishap that upsets this charmed existence.
The young couple now transfers to Paris, where their daughter, Kizette, is born and Tamar begins to take drawing lessons, and to be infuenced by Cubism and Art Deco.
Here is born a geometrical aspect of her art,in some ways almost ornamental, in the highest sense of the word.
First exhibitions and first sales: she exhibits at the Salon d'Automne in 1922,at the Galerie Colette Weil; she travels a lot and shows the world her way of practising art.In her pictures we find the spirit of the time, the car, speed, progress. Futurism influences even her. In her painting, Paris high society, so Bohemian and sometimes outrageously false,is reflected in its crude truth. Tamara is a complex woman, as complex as the climate of the new century.
In her we find contrasting aspects of Nineteenth Century society: the courage to live passionately in the present but also the fragility of abbandonung oneself to other kinds ofslavery, like drugs. Unfortunately De Lempicka has been considered for some time as only an upstart, a social climber who, playing her cards shrewedly, married the rich baron Kuffner in a second marriage, a collector, so guaranteeing herself the possibilty of continuing to paint. But really Tamara should be known and appreciated uniquely for her rich painting of stylistic elegance and of aristocratic subjects which enabled her to be an established figure on the American art scene up to the year of her death.
In 1980.
