Tamara de Lempicka was a Polish-born painter (1894 to 1980) who became the portraitist of Art Deco in Paris. She fled the Russian Revolution, painted duchesses, poets and her lovers in cold, polished color, and left for the United States in 1939. She is remembered for a self-portrait at the wheel of a green Bugatti.
In 1922 she made her public debut at the Salon d'Automne as Monsieur Łempitzky. The painter behind the man's name was a woman, and the museums that have studied her say she did it to be taken more seriously.
The rest of her was rewritten as well. She added a "de" to her married name to suggest an aristocrat. She gave her birth year as 1898, 1900 or 1902, when archives shared by her family point to 1894. And the surname she hid all her life was Hurwitz, the name of a Jewish family in Poland.
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The most famous of her inventions fits on a magazine cover. In 1929 the German fashion magazine Die Dame printed her self-portrait: a woman in a leather helmet and gloves, a gray scarf at her throat, at the wheel of a green Bugatti racing car, cold and out of reach. The picture came to stand for the independent woman of the Jazz Age.
Except that Lempicka never owned a Bugatti. She drove a small yellow Renault, and it was stolen one night while she was out celebrating with friends at the Café de la Rotonde in Montparnasse. In the painting she swapped it for a car that looked richer and more beautiful.
The magazine had asked for a cover that celebrated women's independence. She answered with a portrait of herself in a car she did not own, and it is the image most people see when they hear her name.
What You'll Discover
Where she was really from.
Who got her husband out.
What she took from Cubism.
What the magazine asked for.
What a baron commissioned.
Where her ashes went.