Tamara de Lempicka: A Life of Deco and Decadence by Laura Claridge, originally published in 1999, is due out in paperback next month, as a part of the Bloomsbury Lives of Women series.
Though de Lempicka’s actions are not always admirable (especially in reference to her daughter), but she is interesting. Claridge's is probably the most accurate biography of de Lempicka to date. Sorting fact from fiction could not have been easy; the artist carefully controlled her public image and perpetuated many of the myths surrounding her (the book’s sources include a “sometimes awkward phone conversation”).
Myth vs. reality: Tamara’s self portrait, the cleverly titled Autoportrait: Or, Woman in the Green Bugatti. The artist’s own car was not a Bugatti, nor was it green – it was, according to the artist, a yellow Renault.
The artist at work on a portrait of her first husband, Tadeusz Junosza-Lempicki and below, the still unfinished portrait.
De Lemicka’s strikingly exotic good looks were frequently compared to Greta Garbo’s. It is not suprising, then, that in a 1940s interview, when Tamara and her second husband, Baron Raoul Kuffner, were living in Hollywood (where she was supposedly known as ''the Baroness with a paintbrush'') she named Greta Garbo as the movie industry’s most beautiful actress.
Portrait of Tamara’s daughter, Baroness Kizette De Lempicka-Foxhall (who is herself the author of a book on de Lempika, Passion By Design: The Art and Times of Tamara de Lempicka, 1987).
De Lempicka around the time that she was living in the U.S.A.
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