Welcome to the exhibition “Tamara Lempicka – Beyond Borders”, which celebrates the life and art of one of the most famous Polish artists of the 20th century. The exhibition is not only a presentation of the largest permanent collection of Lempicka’s works in a public collection in Poland, but also a unique opportunity to recall the artist’s Polish roots and her various links with our country. The core of the exhibition consists of works in the collection of the National Museum in Lublin, purchased from the artist’s closest friend, Victor Manuel Contreras. In addition, thanks to the Museum’s close collaboration with Tamara Lempicka’s family – her granddaughter Victoria and her great-granddaughter Marisa – the gallery has been enriched with paintings, drawings and archive films held in the family collection.

Tamara Lempicka came from a wealthy and influential Polish-Russian family with Jewish roots. She spent her childhood in Moscow surrounded by the love of her mother and grandparents. Even as a young girl, she accompanied her grandmother Klementina Dekler on her journey to southern Europe. When Tamara’s grandmother was at the casino, the young girl took drawing lessons.

Tamara attended a school for ladies in Lausanne. However, as she said: “I didn’t care about learning, although others said I should. How bored I was; looking out of the window and fantasising about being in other places and doing something great.” Tamara pretended to be ill and repeatedly persuaded her grandmother to go south, where the warm climate definitely helped her to recover. Thanks to Klementyna and their trips to Italy together, Tamara discovered a great passion for art.

Around 1912, Tamara moved to be with her relatives in St Petersburg. Stefania and Maurycy Stifter had a rich social life, which included parties, balls and frequent trips to the theatre or opera. Tamara, as a teenager, grew up in this setting, oblivious to the radical transformation of her environment and the social and political climate. At one ball, Tamara caught the eye of a young lawyer, Tadeusz Lempicki, whom she subsequently married in Petrograd in 1916. Although no documentary evidence of this has survived, when asked about her wedding in later years, the artist always mentioned the breathtaking dress: “That’s how every wedding dress should be – a woman only has this one opportunity to have everyone look at her, whether she’s beautiful or not”.

In the same year, Maria Krystyna Lempicka, whom Tamara fondly called Kizette, was born. The date of her daughter’s birth was repeatedly modified by the artist, who maintained that she gave birth to her while already living in Paris, between 1918 and 1919.

Tamara’s carefree period of life was ended irrevocably by the outbreak of the October Revolution. Tadeusz Lempicki was arrested by Petrograd Chekists for counter-revolutionary activities. To get her husband out of prison and escape Russia, Tamara enlisted the help of a friendly Swedish consul. The diplomat’s help, however, came at a cost. The price was a night with Lempicka, for which the artist received false documents that allowed her to flee to Finland and then to her family residing in Copenhagen. Tadeusz joined his wife a few weeks later. In 1918, the couple made a brief visit to Warsaw before moving to Paris.

The Paris of the early 1920s became home to a number of aristocratic families who ended up living in distinguished poverty, far from the lost world of luxury and privilege to which they had become accustomed. The Lempicki family, thanks to the sale of Tamara’s emerald ring, managed to rent a modest room without a bathroom in a small Parisian hotel for a few months. The difficult living situation prompted the artist to take decisive steps to improve the family’s conditions. For the rest of her life, she emphasised: “it was then, out of a need to gain financial independence, that I was born as a painter”. It was at that time that she decided to search for a new home, suitable for an artist. Before long, she and her family moved into a three-bedroom flat in Montparnassie, which Tamara painted in the then fashionable, modern colour grey.

In 1925, Tamara’s first solo exhibition took place at the Bottega di Poesia gallery in Milan, owned by Count Emanuel Castelbarca. The artist pledged to bring 30 canvases to the count, but in the end as many as 51 of her paintings went on display at the exhibition. , Tamara, thanks to her host’s patronage and her innate charm, quite quickly blended into the circle of Castelbarca’s friends, which resulted in further commissions for portraits of the Italian aristocracy.

Tamara made at least one trip to Italy every year. Thanks to his close relationship with Emanuel Castelbarck, she met the famous poet D’Annuzio. Lempicka visited him twice at his villa – Il Vittoriale in Gardone – to paint the her portrait of the Italian poet. However, the relationship with the client turned into a flirtation, as evidenced by the preserved letters they sent to each other. The complicated and sexually charged relationship between the would-be lovers led Tamara to believe that the ambitious D’Annunzio respected both her success and her femininity. “The former, however, made the Italian lover set his sights on possessing the latter,” she recalled. All that was left to Tamara as a memento of the poet was a precious ring with a giant topaz.

In 1927, Tamara Lempicka received a commission for a portrait from Dr Pierre Boucard, the inventor of the famous Lactéol pill. This acquaintance resulted in commissions for portraits of the Boucard family, which made a significant contribution to the Lempickis’ budget and opened the door for Tamara to French society. Lempicka portrayed her subject in two ways: in addition to using paraphernalia indicating that he was an exceptional scientist, she emphasised his belonging to the elite. The delicate pearl on his tie, the manicured moustache and the carelessly rolled collar of his doctor’s apron are the attributes of a man of success.

The painting of Kizette on a balcony from 1927 was Tamara Lempicka’s first prize-winning canvas. She received the main prize for it at the Exposition Internationale des BeauxArts exhibition  in Bordeaux. In it, we see Tamara’s then eleven-year-old daughter posing for her mother on the balcony, dressed in a short, simple dress, white knee socks and black slippers. Growing in the background, the city with its irregular, sharp, cubic forms gives the impression of being dangerous, but Kizette is separated from it by a railing and wrapped in softly draped fabric, suspended between the safety of her home and the dangers of the outside world. The young model’s bold pose and mature look emphasise her germinating femininity and awakening eroticism. The award encouraged Tamara to portray her daughter more often, for whom it was also a chance to spend time with the perpetually busy Chérie, as she used to call Tamara. Another painting by Lempicka, Kizette in a Pink Dress, was sold to the Museum of Fine Arts in Nantes. This was the artist’s first transaction with a public institution.

Portrait of Tadeusz Lempicki from 1928 shows the artist’s then ex-husband. Consciously leaving his hand unpainted was a symbol of her critical attitude towards her husband, who, according to Tamara, had failed to keep the marriage vows taken years before and had failed to live up to the new reality in which their family found itself. After the Lempickis arrived in France, the artist quickly found herself in a new reality – the liberated Paris of the 1920s. Forced to support her family without help from her depressed husband, she soon became one of the most popular artists of her era. Her growing popularity and her love of the pleasures of nightlife strained the relationship between the couple. Tadeusz accused Tamara of numerous affairs and of neglecting her duties as a wife and mother. This led to the break-up of their marriage in 1927, when, after a brief stay in Poland, Tadeusz announced to Tamara that he was having an affair with Irena Spiess. Tamara, unable to come to terms with the loss of Tadeusz, made several attempts to win back her husband. His resolute refusal to take her back and Tamara’s rejection devastated the artist, and she fell into despair. Wanting to regain control of her life, she threw herself into creative work. It was then that she painted Tadeusz’s portrait.

In 1928, Tamara met Baron Raoul Kuffner, who loved and collected her works. Baron Kuffner commissioned Tamara to paint a portrait of his lover at the time, Nana de Herrera, a famous Andalusian dancer. “When she turned up at the studio, she was badly, inelegantly dressed, not chic. I thought: oh no, I don’t want to paint her. I couldn’t believe it is the famous Nana de Herrera…” Tamara said. In the painting, the artist clearly signalled her intentions to win the favour of the Austro-Hungarian baron. She painted her rival scantily clad in black lace, posed in a convulsive arrangement of the body inscribed in tight coffin-like forms.

From 1929, Tamara Lempicka rented a studio at 7 rue Méchain, which she was keen to use to promote her image and work. Designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens, the two-storey modernist apartment served as a studio, art showroom, gallery, as well as an apartment and social venue. The interior was designed by the artist’s younger sister, Adrianna Gorska de Montaut. The most famous photographs of the apartment’s interior were taken by Thérèse Bonney, and Lempicka willingly posed for them. The apartment was also immortalised in the 1932 film etude Un bel atelier moderne, which is presented at the exhibition.

First Communion, is another portrait depicting the artist’s daughter, Kizzete. In 1929, Tamara was invited to take part in the General National Exhibition, held in Poznań to mark the tenth anniversary of Poland’s independence. The artist displayed several works, including First Communion, at the exhibition. She received a bronze medal for her work. And although as many as thirty-three artists were bestowed with the same award, for Lempicka, the accolade won in Poland was of great significance for the rest of her life. She would often boast about the medal when in company.

In the spring of 1929, as Tamara was getting ready for an evening out, the phone rang in her Paris apartment. She was asked for an immediate meeting by a caller with a pronounced English accent. It turned out to be the young American millionaire Rufus Bush. They met just a few minutes later, when Bush asked Tamara to paint a portrait of his fiancée, to which she agreed. In September, Lempicka boarded the ocean liner “Paris” and set sail to conquer the new world. After a decade of exposure to American music, literature, and representatives of the cultural elite in Paris, Tamara had a favourable impression of the United States and associated it with progress and opportunity. Her portrait of Mrs Bush – one of the most interesting female images in the artist’s oeuvre – was created during her stay over several months in New York.

On her return from the United States, Lempicka travelled to Italy, where she met Gino Puglisi, an Italian architect, soon to be Tamara’s friend and a collector of her paintings. He acquired his first painting by the artist in 1933, and by his death in 1992 had amassed as many as twenty. The later friendship between the short-lived lovers is evidenced not only by as many as four portraits of Puglisi, created between 1934 and 1963, but also by a long-standing correspondence that lasted, with brief interruptions, until the artist’s death in 1980.
On 18 January 1935, Tamara wrote to Gina Puglisi: “… these endless nights when one cannot sleep. I can’t work or read, my depression is too great. Please don’t be angry that I write so little, but I think of you often, and you can find all that is good in me in my paintings in your collection.”

In February 1934, Tamara Lempicka married Baron Kuffner and from then on she was known as the “Baroness with a paintbrush”. However, she struggled with depression at the beginning of her marriage. Deepening states of melancholy prevented Tamara from enjoying the social life of Vienna and Budapest. Longing for sunshine, she visited Italy several times. She also made a trip to visit family living in Warsaw. Her state caused a change in the subject matter of the work. Erotic bodies of models and elegant portraits of ladies were replaced by images of saints, faces of old people and people in pain.

Mr and Mrs Kuffner had been preparing to leave France since 1938. Concerned about the rising tide of fascism in Europe, Tamara, because of her own and the Baron’s background, urged her husband to sell most of his estate and transfer assets to the United States. In 1939, just before she left for America, Tamara organised a farewell party for her closest friends. The official reason she gave for her departure across the ocean was the considerable number of commissions for portraits she had received from wealthy Americans. During the party, Tamara toasted: “I’ll be back for another great party with my friends after I have completed my orders in America.”

After leaving Europe, Tamara and her husband visited New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami and Cuba. They initially settled in Hollywood. In no time at all, Tamara had cultivated friendships among the city’s most prominent people. She and her husband rented an impressive mansion where she gave huge banquets for several hundred people.
Tamara carefully thought out and organised by her move to the United States. Shortly after settling into the Hollywood villa, Lempicka announced a competition for a model who needed to bear a delusive resemblance to the character in the painting Suzanne Bathing. The search for the perfect girl saw thousands of advertisements published in the American press. The media hype surrounding the competition brought Tamara unheard of publicity. The successful model, however, was no random girl. Tamara’s choice fell on her friend’s daughter, the young Cecilia Meyers. She titled the painting At the Opera.

In addition to social gatherings and individual exhibitions, Tamara was involved in charity collections for the war effort. In 1941, after the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, she actively participated as a volunteer in the Emergency Corps. Her commitment was recognised and she was quickly promoted from the rank of sergeant to lieutenant of the Education Department team, for which she also created the design of the women’s uniform. She was also involved in aid programmes initiated by Ignacy Paderewski, often contributing to the budget of a fund that worked to help Poland.

Tamara exhibited her work at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York. The exhibition attracted the interest of the elite of the time, who were keen to visit the exhibition and admire Lempicka’s work. Photographs by Nikolai Orlov documenting the exhibition’s opening have survived to this day. Marina Marshall known as Princess Orlova, Marion Mills Preminger and Salvador Dali can be seen on them.

In 1942, the Kuffners moved again to New York. They purchased a two-storey apartment in a building standing on the East River, which featured a studio with “good northern light”.  After the move, Lempicka continued to work in her old style, although there was increasing criticism of her work. She soon abandoned figurative painting almost entirely, directing her interest towards abstract painting, which was fashionable at the time. And although she was hostile to the new trend, she followed it with precision and perseverance for almost a decade.

After the war, Tamara renewed her European contacts and, around 1947, went on her first trip to Europe with her husband. She also returned to Paris, which at that time seemed alien to her. The city after the war bore little resemblance to the vibrant artistic and cultural capital of Europe, which the artist had left in 1938. In addition, the public was no longer interested in her work, which had a negative impact on Lempicka’s wellbeing.

In the 1950s, Tamara experimented with both abstraction and surrealism. Eager to climb back to the top of the creative and financial worlds, so she reinvented herself once again. She increasingly displayed her latest paintings, which she created with a spatula. Unfortunately, the new style, despite receiving positive feedback, did not appeal to the public. The works painted in this way stemmed from Tamara’s admiration for the Pompeii frescoes and were created continuously until her death in 1980.

On 3 November 1961, Henry Kolar, the Kuffners’ chief accountant, contacted Tamara to tell her that her husband of a heart attack during a boat trip. Tamara became hysterical. Kizette recalled a conversation with her mother as follows: “I never dreamed that my mother would be so hard hit by the death of Baron Kuffner; she was really devastated.”

After Baron Kuffner’s death, Kizette proposed to Tamara that she live with her family in Houston. The eccentric grandmother moved into the Warwick Hotel and often visited her granddaughters. Lempicka’s strong personality dominated the Foxhall family. In Houston, Tamara quickly assumed the role of head of the family and took her daughter and son-in-law’s circle of close friends by storm. Owning a large fortune, she spent money uncontrollably, although she never admitted it. For this reason, Kizette quickly became her mother’s assistant taking care of her mother’s finances, managing her correspondence and fulfilling Tamara’s every whim. An ageing artist whose art failed to attract interest was determined to bathe in the attention of her family.

In 1972, forty-eight of Tamara Lempicka’s paintings from 1925 to 1935 went on show at the artist’s retrospective exhibition at the Galerie du Luxembourg in Paris. The exhibition was a success in re-establishing Tamara Lempicka’s name among the most important artists of the 20th century. Thrilled by her success, Tamara returned to her old work, making replicas of her most famous paintings from the 1920s and 1930s.

In the early 1970s, Lempicka increasingly left Houston for the town of Cuernavaca Kuernawaka] in Mexico. She fell in love with with the cobbled winding streets that led to a colourful market in the centre.  So much so that she decided to move permanently to Mexico. She rented the villa Tres Bambus, which she only bought outright in 1978 thanks to the persuasion of her friend the maestro Victor Manuel Contreras, whom she had met years before in Paris. The renewed friendship with the sculptor was very important to the artist, as it was Contreras who was Tamara’s patient and calm companion in the last years of her life.

On 18 March 1980, Tamara Lempicka passed away in her sleep. In accordance with her last wish, her body was cremated. Maestro Contreras collected the urn containing the artist’s ashes from the funeral home. On 20 March, a small funeral service was held, attended by no more than fifty people, which caused bitterness among the artist’s loved ones. In accordance with Tamara’s will, her the ashes were scattered over the crater of the Popocatépetl volcano.

After Tamara’s death, the artist’s daughter, called Kizette, not only returns with her family to the Mexican villa Tres Bambus over the following years, but also with extraordinary persistence collects and catalogs Lempicka’s legacy. We owe her meticulous archiving of all press releases that appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. Press clippings, interviews and posters about Tamara are placed in extensive albums, the reading of which reveals to researchers of Lempicka’s work forgotten stories about the Polish artist’s successes in Europe, the United States, Mexico or Japan.

After the death of Maria Krystyna, the care of Tamara’s artistic achievements and memory is taken over by Lempicka’s granddaughter Victoria and great-granddaughter Marisa. Their activities contribute to the establishment of the Tamara de Lempicka Estate, which not only accumulates ownership rights to the legacy of the famous painter, but is also actively involved in organizing exhibitions and shows, publishing books and albums, and creating theatre performances and films.

The aim of the exhibition is to show, using examples of paintings and sketches, how the Lempicka’s work developed from the early 1920s to the end of the 1970s. Divided into thematic zones, the exhibition is intended to focus the viewer’s attention on the most important topics discussed by Lempicka. The exhibition includes works representing the artist’s style developed in the 1920s, in which she uses strong drawings, expressive chiaroscuro, austerity of form and the sharpness of color.

In works from the 1940s, she takes up sacred themes and returns to the topic of still lifes, reveals her already developed painting skills, and concludes with a deep moral message requiring thinking about the passage of time and transience. The exhibition also gives the opportunity to get acquainted with works from less known periods in Lempicka’s work, dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. The viewer can notice a change in painting technique and a departure from classical motifs towards abstract painting.

This small-scale drawing by Lempicka reflects a change in the fashion of the 1920s. At the time, the ideal of feminine beauty became an independent, modern woman with an athletic and slender figure, wearing geometrised dresses, an à la garçonne hairstyle and a hat-helmet created in 1923 covering the entire head.

Tamara Lempicka, who became an art déco icon by consciously creating her image, appreciated the importance of fashion. Not surprisingly, she soon began to collaborate with women’s magazines such as: “Vogue”, “Bluszcz” or “Świat”, designing covers and illustrations for them.

Tamara Lempicka’s work is rarely identified with images of animals, although this motif often appears in her late works created from the 1960s. he main subject in them becomes pigeons, swans or rabbits, painted with a new technique using paint putty. In this context, the artist’s early drawing of horses hopping around 1925 becomes interesting. This small-scale work carries interesting clues about the artist’s inspiration for the motif of agitated horse bodies rearing over a cliff on paper using the charcoal technique. Lempicka had emigrated to Paris less than seven years earlier, fleeing St. Petersburg from the Bolshevik Revolution. Thus, she was well acquainted with one of the city’s most recognizable monuments, a statue depicting Peter I on horseback. The statue of a horseman perched on reared horse was placed on a huge pedestal made of granite erratic boulder, intended to make the sculptural scene more dynamic. The selected boulder was already known to locals by then as the Stone of Thunder. According to the legend attributed to him, the rock was supposed to have been struck by lightning, splitting it into pieces. However, a second horse appears in Lempicka’s drawing, which may be a reference to the mythological harnessing of the sun god Helios, who, fulfilling a promise made to his son Phaeton, allowed him to drive his chariot. However, the young horseman lacked the skill to tame the steeds that carried away the divine chariot, bringing the threat of fire to both heaven and earth, and thus the reemergence of Chaos. Zeus, in order to maintain balance in the universe, was forced to hurl lightning and knock down the irresponsible Phaeton into the abyss.

The drawing could therefore represent Lempicka’s reflection on her former life, irretrievably lost, and her hope for a better tomorrow.

One of Lempicka’s favourite themes was the motif of intertwined innocence and sin. In her work, innocent and licentious figures collide – anonymous people frozen in erotic compositions; the artist’s early sketches are devoid of characters situated in urban settings or later cramped interiors.

Lempicka’s drawing is a sketch from the painting The Kiss by Francesco Hayez, a work considered a symbol of Italian Romanticism and an allegory of Italian unification.

The paintings of Florentine artists undoubtedly had a significant influence on the formation of Tamara Lempicka’s style. The artist repeatedly returned to Florence to study the art, among others, of Jacopo Pontormo. Lempicka’s fondness for the Italian painter, who is a representative of Florentine Mannerism, can be seen not only in the sketch made of the painting Venus and Cupid, but also in the letter she wrote to Gabriele D’Annunzio during her stay in Florence in 1926: “Dear Master, and friend (I hope and wish for this). Here I am in Florence!!! Why in Florence? To work and study Pontormo’s cartons, to purify myself through contact with great Italian art”.

Made in Italy, the sketch was used by Lempicka to paint her famous canvases Myrtle and Women in the Bath in 1929, in which the artist took over from Pontormo’s curved body position, expressive modeling of arms, legs and abdomen.

Self-Portrait (also known as Self-Portrait in a Green Bugatti) is considered the most frequently reproduced work by Tamara Lempicka. She painted Self-Portrait in 1929 specifically commissioned by “Die Dame” magazine.

Lempicka often cited the story of the painting’s creation, claiming that the editor of “Die Dame” spotted her outside the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo as she got out of her sports car. The man was said to be so enthralled with the elegantly dressed and confident painter that he approached her and asked if he could take some pictures of her. Tamara’s response was to offer to paint a picture for the cover of the magazine. Of course, this was an invented story, told by the artist to the press in order to strengthen interest in her work. In fact, Lempicka had been working with the magazine for a long time, and Self-Portrait was another commission that was presented on the cover of the July issue of “Die Dame”.

Self-Portrait in a Green Bugatti is a small-sized painting painted on a board. In it, Tamara depicted herself driving a Bugatti sports car synonymous with luxury. A gray shawl hangs under her neck, her head is adorned with a pilot’s cap, and her hands, clutching the steering wheel, are wrapped in leather gloves. A strand of golden hair sticks out from under the cap, the lips are painted with red lipstick, and the squinted eyes cast a slightly defiant and confident look. The painting became a symbol of the crazy 1920s (Roaring Twenties). Tamara and the automobile, captured in a tight frame, seem to meld together in a rush, forming a single organism or mechanism. The Self-Portrait of the machine woman became an icon of the art déco era. Thus, the artist created a new image of a woman: free, strong and sensual, in control of a luxurious but also dangerous machine. In 1978 “The New York Times” called Tamara “the goddess of the automobile era with a steely gaze.”

One of the lesser-known motifs present in Lempicka’s work is maternity, to which the artist has repeatedly returned. Works on this theme constitute a side trend in the painter’s oeuvre, which she nevertheless continued tirelessly throughout the years of her artistic activity. The calm compositions with family themes show the extraordinary tenderness and the bond between the portrayed mother and her child.

In the 1930s, the motif of motherhood in Lempicka’s paintings evolved and, in addition to family scenes, was enriched with religious content. In her paintings, the artist returned not only to Renaissance Madonnas, but also to Byzantine iconography familiar to her from Russian Orthodox churches.

In the wake of the worsening social mood and political instability in Europe, Tamara increasingly took up themes in her work that reflected her fear of war and of leaving for the unknown. A seemingly innocent drawing of a young boy sitting on the edge of a bed, with an empty chair next to it, is a work in which one can sense the melancholic emptiness and the artist’s longing for peace and stability in life.

In Lempicka’s works from the 1950s, one can see a slow departure from the style developed twenty years earlier, which, thanks to her studies in Andre Lhote’s studio, resulted in the artist’s great respect for the human body. Tamara, in the later period of her work, while not abandoning her subject matter of still life or the nude, increasingly leaned towards representations devoid of strong geometrization of the figure. Thus, in the painting Nude with Pitcher I it is difficult not to find the old master’s compositional solutions. An example is the work of an artist teacher Woman with a fan, by the artist’s teacher. In the middle of the 20th century, Lempicka traveled to Italy several times “in search of light”, which was also reflected, among other things, in the nudes of the 1950s, characterized by a strong illumination of the color palette, how different from the dark and violent sensual imagery done in the Paris period.

Tamara Lempicka has repeatedly returned to her favorite compositions, creating different versions of her previous paintings. Thanks to the analysis of the author’s replicas, it is possible to see how the artist’s style has evolved over the decades. In the unfinished painting sketch Women in a Turban III, which is the third version of the painting, one can see not only the artist’s passion for the way of painting richly draped fabric, but also the few changes in colors or details that distinguish each subsequent canvas from the previous one.

Already in the early period of Tamara Lempicka’s work one can see the artist’s fascination with the Orient fashionable among Parisians during the interwar period. Her interest in the countries of the Middle and Far East can be seen, among other things, in her paintings of men and women in turbans. They are often part of the artist’s search for exotic beauty, luxury and wealth.

The painting is the author’s replica, which Lempicka made in 1957 based on a 1941 canvas of the same name. In the 1950s. Tamara increasingly experimented with abstraction and works painted with spatula. However, the artist’s new style, despite positive reviews from critics, did not appeal to the public. As a result, Lempicka sometimes returned to themes replicating motifs from canvases dating to the 1930s and 1940s.

Tamara, well acquainted with the work of the European masters, has repeatedly entered into an artistic dialogue with them. The painting Dutch Girl is an example of one of the artist’s favorite portrait subjects – she depicted young girls dressed in folk costumes, reflecting her fascination with the simplicity of traditional life in the European countryside – but also a reference to 17th-century Dutch painting. The painter, like the Dutch masters, liked to portray, both representatives of the wealthy part of society, as well as old people, beggars or domestic servants. On the canvas, we can see seated in an ascetic interior the pensive figure of a young woman dressed in an outfit reminiscent of Dutch clothing of the 2nd half of the 17th century. Looking at the painting, it is impossible not to notice direct quotes taken from the canvases The Milkmaid by Johannes Vermeer or Woman with a Child in the Pantry by Pieter de Hooch.

Lempicka’s work from the 1930s reveals the artist’s interest in both religious and philosophical issues. Struggling with depression, the painter produced at the time a series of portraits that departed from the style developed in the 1920s. Numerous trips to Rome, Vienna and Budapest, however, did not improve Lempicka’s well-being, and so in an effort to improve Tamara’s health, Baron Kuffner ordered his wife a stay at the famous Zurich Bircher Clinic, where she attended sessions with a psychiatrist. In 1936, after the end of her treatment, Lempicka painted a picture in which she sublimated her doctor, using his face in a portrait of Saint Anthony. The work was thus part of a group of paintings created between 1935 and 1939 in which the artist combined the realism of the Renaissance masters with 17th-century Dutch portraitists.

Towards the end of her life, Tamara Lempicka once again returned to religious motifs, producing, among other works, a number of original replicas of the portrait of Saint Anthony. The presented work comes from the years 1979-1980.

The painting comes from a highly regarded period in Lempicka’s oeuvre, falling in the 1930s. The themes taken up by the painter at this time reflect not only Lempicka’s fear of the coming war, but also a time when she was struggling with depression. The artist increasingly focuses on the depiction of human beings and their suffering. Her interest in religious and philosophical issues is therefore translated into the paintings she created, which refer to both biblical motifs and portraits of usually anonymous models, which are a profound painterly analysis of their mental state.

In the painting Head of John the Baptist, the artist makes excellent use of a well-known motif recalling an event involving the Herodian femme fatale – Salome – whose dance has become a symbol of unrestrained senses, deluding common sense and, consequently, leading to a breach of moral principles.

The title Head of John the Baptist was probably given secondarily. An analysis of the painting indicates that the artist depicted on the canvas the head of Holofernes, the commander of the Assyrian army that besieged the city of Bethulia in Galilee, inspiring the work of Artemisia Gentileschi.

The canvases of the 1950s show Lempicka’s departure from cubist, geometric figures with the classical form of imagery still present.

The new painting language used by the artist at the time was a kind of conscious formal dialogue with historical styles, to which she eagerly returned. Subsequent visits to Italian museums resulted in returns to themes drawn from the Italian Renaissance.

In a series of small portraits of the “Madonina”, Lempicka, was probably inspired by the face of the Virgin Mary from the Pieta of the Vatican chiseled by Michelangelo.

Lempicka’s paintings are characterised by an exceptionally humanistic character – the human figure occupies a central place in her work. She devoted most space in her paintings to the portrait. These depictions resulted not only from a desire for profit, but above all from an inner need on the part of the artist: to exalt the plasticity of the human figure and to capture the most expressive features of physical beauty. Undoubtedly, the painting Portrait of a Girl reveals Lempicka’s fascination with the art of Sandro Botticelli and Raphael Santi, and thus the model of Renaissance portraiture they developed.

The influence of classical art on Lempicka’s work and her fascination with Renaissance, Mannerism and Baroque painting can be found, among other things, in the way the artist sought to capture the shape of the hand in painting.

As early as the 1940s, the painter began a series devoted exclusively to hands. After emigrating to the United States, she even prepared for an exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. The exhibition envisaged the presentation of canvases that were to feature only representations of hand gestures. The subject chosen by Lempicka was not accidental – according to the artist, the way the hands were arranged could show the personality of each person. Due to the lack of preserved documents confirming the realization of the exhibition, there is a presumption that the exhibition was never realized.

Lempicka returned to the painting Closed Gate from 1945 in the 1970s, when she decided to change the color of the background and signature.

In 1941, an exhibition presenting twenty-two of the artist’s paintings was organized at the Julien Gallery in New York. The exhibition was a huge success, which contributed to the presentation of Lempicka’s work at a new gallery in Los Angeles. Julien Levy presented the artist’s paintings in a new and unprecedented way – deliberately darkening the room, illuminating only the canvases hanging on the walls. Initially, the exhibition caused delight among the public, with favorable reviews in the press, but the looming specter of war has turned American customers attention away from art, which has translated into few sales of paintings. Lempicka, disappointed by the lack of interest in her work, left for a country estate in Connecticut where she focused on painting. It is probably there that the painting Lemon, a still life painted by Lempicka in 1941, is created. The work provides an excellent insight into the Polish artist’s mastery of technique. The porcelain bowl and the lemon placed on top of it are indeed a display of the experienced artist’s precision and technical ability. Set in the open space of a stable, the composition also contains a moral message instructing us to think about the passage of time and the transience of things.

Lempicka took up the subject of still life from the 1920s until her death in 1980. The paintings show mundane objects in careful arrangements. The artist focused on showing the shapes, textures, lights and shadows of a given composition. It was in her painterly studies of the props of everyday life that Lempicka sought a modern, timeless form. She subjected her still lifes to a certain artistic stylization, in which one can find both inspiration from Dutch or Flemish art and the influence of education in the studio of André Lhote, an artist whose work combined the experience of Cubism with the classical painting of the old masters.

The painting Bowl of Fruit is an example of a still life in which the artist uses and continues to update the teachings of her Parisian master. Carefully arranged in a white porcelain bowl, apples, pears, grapes and plums, decorated with foliage, are characterized by the aforementioned geometrization of shapes, but the preservation of classical principles of harmony and balance remains evident. This attractive union of tradition and modernity, as well as the applied decorativeness, determined not only the extraordinary popularity of the still-life theme in Tamara Lempicka’s work, but also turned the iconographic memento mori into a constantly updated theme, expressing the delight and vitality of la vie moderne.

At the end of her life, Tamara Lempicka lived in the Tres Bambus villa, located in the city of eternal spring – Cuernavaca in Mexico. Still, she returned to her Paris apartment. It was during one of the artist’s visits to Paris that she was contacted by Alain Blondel, who, after a brief visit to the studio, began an effort that lasted several years for Tamara to allow him and his friends to remind the public of her work. Despite Lempicka’s reluctance to the young art dealer’s idea, she eventually agreed to present her works at the Galerie du Luxembourg. These were works dating from the 1920s and 1930s.The exhibition was a success, which contributed to the creation of original replicas of the most famous works including La Belle Raphaelae III, a painting that was probably the last canvas Lempicka worked on.

The work depicts one of her favorite models from the Parisian period – Rafaela, whom Tamara met in the Bois de Boulogne and about whom she said: “She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen”. In this late performance of the famous motif, Lempicka, despite her heavy brushstrokes, still exhibits the characteristics of an elaborate painting technique while maintaining the model’s body layout, which was studied years ago, and a tight frame – but changed the palette of colors and the way she used chiaroscuro.

The first abstractions in Lempicka’s work were created as early as the 1950s. Initially, in her landscape studies, the artist used the surrealist motif of the metamorphosis of shapes and forms combining biomorphic imagery. The following years led Tamara to solutions in which she began a slow process of transforming elements of reality, such as sheets of paper, curtains, ribbons or pearls, immersed in abstract compositions. The slow reduction of shapes and objects contributed to paintings of a purely abstract nature, thus inscribing Lempicka’s painting into the realm of modern artistic practices.

Aware of the changes taking place in American art, Tamara Lempicka began to experiment with abstract painting, which, alongside nudes and still lifes, became an important component of the artist’s oeuvre. In the 1960s, the painter created a varied dialogue with the tradition of abstract painting, using complex arrangements of interpenetrating ribbons, colourful stripes and geometric forms filled with varied painterly textures. The undefined polygonal geometric forms, overlapping and interpenetrating each other, modelled the space, dynamising the canvas.

The painting Abstract Composition is essentially an interpretation of the paintings of Serge Poliakoff, a Russian artist who lived in Paris at the same time as Lempicka. It is his compositions, which consist of irregular and adjacent geometric multicolored shapes that are individual formal and conceptual solutions of the artist. The painter’s canvases, quickly gained a prominent place among post-war abstract painting, finding their way into institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which Lempicka frequently visited.

A radical change in Lempicka’s style came in the 1960s. Experimenting with new painting techniques, the artist increasingly created paintings painted with spatula. Furthermore, in order to achieve the right saturation of a particular colour, she asks Foxy, her daughter’s husband, to make paints for her by mixing natural pigments with linseed oil.

The works of this period relate to Renaissance monochrome paintings derived from a medieval technique called grisaille. The painting Washerwoman, which features the hazy contours of a female figure and a seemingly uniform range of colors, actually opens up to the viewer an array of hues – from pearly grays to beiges to pinkish sepia – conveying the artist’s great sensitivity to sudden changes in light, as well as her technical proficiency in handling the new painting technique. In addition, the theme that Lempicka chose may be inspired by frames from everyday life taken from Dutch painting and the artist’s fascination with French Impressionism.