This is a story that takes in revolutions wars bisexuality, art and fast cars, and ends in a fiery grave.
Tamara de Lempicka transformed the spirit of the jazz age into a sleek visual language of polished surfaces, chrome curves, sharp angles and dangerous glamour, capturing a world intoxicated by speed, sex and modernity.
She was powerful, dynamic, glamorous and she was subversive.
Some called her the goddess of the automobile age, but she was also known as the baroness with a brush.
Dazzlingly charismatic, openly bisexual and deeply immersed in Parisian nightlife and high society.
She embodied the same confidence that animates her portraits.
With Lempicka, it's hard to work out what was true and what wasn't.
She carefully constructed her own image in the same way she constructed her paintings.
Nowhere is this clearer than in her most famous painting Autoportrait, or Tamara in the Green Bugatti, a painting that truly encapsulates the spirit of modernity.
In her hands, women were not passive beauties to be admired from a distance.
They were confident, worldly, modern and unapologetically in control.
She claimed agency, not just for herself, but for every woman who appeared in her work.
This episode discusses that iconic self-portrait which brings together her charisma, her worldview and a pivotal moment in history into a single unforgettable image.
Lempicka constantly lied about her age, making life difficult for historians.
But we now know that she was born to Mara Rosa Hurwitz in Warsaw on the 6th of June 1894.
Her parents were Jewish but converted to Christianity before her birth.
Partly as a means of protection, as at the time, Warsaw was part of the Russian Empire and anti-Jewish sentiment was intensifying.
Waves of pogrom swept through the Empire and for wealthy Jewish families like Lempicka's, conversion offered a degree of safety.
Her childhood was financially privileged, but emotionally unsettled.
Her father disappeared when she was still young, possibly by suicide, though the details remain murky.
What's interesting about Lempicka is that she largely lived in a world of women.
We know next to nothing about her father, her brother, or much about her first or second husband.
But the women in her life are not only well documented, but they were central formative, influential and visible.
You And when you look at her paintings, her women are monumental sculpted, self-possessed and emotionally sealed.
Perhaps that's not accidental.
As a child, she moved between Warsaw, Moscow, and St.
Petersburg.
And one figure proved especially influential, her wealthy grandmother, Clementina, who took her to Florence and Rome.
There, Lempicka developed an early love for museums, Renaissance painting and classical sculpture influences that would later resurface in her work, particularly in terms of drapery positioning and the vacant gaze.
When she was 15, she met the dashing aristocrat Thaddeus de Lempicki, and they fell madly in love.
They were married in 1916, but the Russian Revolution a year later turned their world upside down.
Thaddeus was briefly imprisoned until Tamara bribed the prison authorities and he was released.
The couple fled to Paris in 1918 as penniless refugees, arriving just as the city was exploding into the hedonism of the roaring twenties, the Jazz Age.
This was really where her story began.
Her husband had no professional connections in Paris and it seems little desire to work.
Their daughter, Maria Christina, was born in 1919 and, having sold all her family jewelry to survive and faced with financial ruin, Tamara realized she would have to support them.
She made a decision, she would become an artist.
She had her first painting lessons with Maurice Denis, whose style was somewhat archaic, but he was a solid teacher.
More important was her later training with André Lot, who invented a revised form of cubism.
I suppose we could call it a safe form of cubism.
Unlike the radical, often abstract and monochromatic approach of Pablo Picasso, Lot's style retained recognizable forms, vibrant colors and classical composition.
Lempicka's style is often described as art deco, but structurally it owes a great deal to cubism, not its radical fragmentation but its method of organising form.
She used cubism as a structural framework, using geometric simplification and breaking bodies and objects into solid, simplified forms in the manner of Paul Cézanne.
And to that structure, she added the sleek surfaces and seductive glamour of Art Deco modernity.
Her bold, fashionable style quickly attracted attention, and she began to sell.
But she never forgot how she left all her wealth behind in Russia.
And so she decided that for every painting she sold, she would buy a diamond bracelet with the proceeds.
And if she ever needed to flee, she could take them with her and start again.
When she exhibited at the Paris Salon between 1922 and 1925, she signed her work Lempitsky, the masculine version of her name, and was listed in catalogues as a man.
She knew she would sell less work being a female artist.
So it was a calculated move in a system run entirely by men.
In fact, her true identity was only revealed in 1925, when she held her first solo exhibition.
In the 1920s the world was changing quickly.
The First World War had devastated Europe, toppled empires and left millions dead.
Old political orders collapsed and many of the values that had shaped 19th century society suddenly felt fragile or outdated.
In their place came a fascination with modern life.
Machines, skyscrapers, automobiles, cinema and electric light.
The future no longer felt distant, it felt immediate.
Art Deco became the style that expressed this new mood.
The name comes from an exhibition held in Paris in 1925, devoted to modern design.
Architects, designers and artists turned away from the flowing curves of Art Nouveau and embraced something harder, cleaner and more structured.
Art deco is geometric, polished and precise.
Forms were reduced to bold shapes, surfaces sleek and reflective like chrome or glass.
In the years after a war defined by machines and mechanization, this aesthetic felt unmistakably modern and became the visual signature of a world trying to rebuild itself through speed, progress and modern design.
Tamara de Lempicka brought this language into painting.
But her modernity was not only stylistic.
Her women are not passive sitters.
They reflect the changing role of women after the war, meeting the viewer's gaze with confidence and self-possession.
Through these images, she captured the spirit of the times, a world fascinated by speed, luxury and the promise of a modern new life.
In 1928, Thaddeus filed for divorce.
He had grown frustrated with Tamara's lifestyle of excess and her affairs with both men and women.
That year she met Raoul Kufner, an art collector and baron of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.
It wasn't long before the two were an item and then married.
Now having a title to her name, the press quickly dubbed her the baroness with a brush.
At the same time that Lempicka was forging her artistic identity, Parrish was establishing itself as a centre of creative freedom, excess and experimentation.
Her unique style fitted the zeitgeist, but her paintings did more than echo contemporary fashion.
Beneath their polish lay a sophisticated engagement with art history.
The word iconic is often used to describe Lempicka, and in her case it is accurate in more ways than one.
She grew up around Russian Orthodox icons and their influence can be felt in the stillness, the detached gaze and the monumentality of her figures, which confront the viewer with an almost devotional authority.
She admired Renaissance and Baroque art, as well as modern movements such as Italian Futurism and French Cubism.
In some circles there was a backlash against these modern movements and a renewed interest in figuration and the human form.
Lempicka positioned herself precisely at this intersection, embracing modern aesthetics while anchoring it in classical tradition.
A defining feature of her style is the sculptural quality of her figures, achieved through careful chiaroscuro and the study of sculpture from antiquity through to the baroque.
This influence is especially clear in Bernini, where Lempicka directly references his ecstasy of Saint Teresa.
Her version heightens the erotic tension already present in the sculpture, transforming it into a knowingly sensual and subtly sapphic image.
She particularly admired the cool marble-like classicism of Ingres, whose influences become clear when comparing the Turkish bath with her 1929 painting Women Bathing.
Likewise, her most famous nude, which portrays her lover Raffaella, seems to nod to Courbet's La Bacchante.
It was this synthesis between classical composition and modern geometric structure that allowed her to develop an instantly recognizable style, and Lempicka would funnel all of these influences, along with a carefully crafted self-image, into the painting that would come to define her.
In the 1920s, driving was still coded as masculine.
Cars were machines associated with speed, risk and control.
By placing herself behind the wheel of a high-speed car, Lempicka turns the traditional gender dynamic inside out.
What truly sets Lempicka apart is not only how she painted, but from whose perspective.
Her women are not passive beauties offered up for inspection.
They are not idealized venuses or moralized nudes.
They are often erotic, openly so, but they are painted through the female gaze.
Lempicka was openly bisexual, and her attraction to women animates and intensifies her work.
In this painting, clearly inspired by the futurist movement's obsession with cars and speed, a cool, knowing gaze meets us head-on.
Half-closed eyelids suggest someone fully aware of her power and entirely comfortable with it.
One gloved hand rests lightly on the steering wheel of a fast expensive Bugatti.
The billowing folds of a scarf fluttering out to her right create the illusion of motion and clearly shows the geometric influence of cubism.
And the striking diagonal line of the car door cuts across the composition like a shield separating her from us.
She looks outward but remains unreachable.
A flash of vermilion animates the faintest trace of a smile on the lips of the driver.
Everything is polished, metallic and aerodynamic.
The car, clothing and even the figure merge into one perfect machine.
But how much of this painting is style and how much is substance?
Just as Jacques-Louis David had portrayed Napoleon calm upon a fiery horse more than a century earlier.
As I showed in my video about that painting, Lempicka shows herself in control of one of the most powerful machines of her time.
In both cases, the image is less about factual accuracy than about symbolic truth.
In reality, Lempicka didn't own a green Bugatti.
She drove a small yellow Renault.
But this image wasn't about depicting mundane reality.
It was about the story she wanted to convey.
It was a statement about wealth and status and how she wanted to be seen.
And by extension, how other women could imagine themselves.
The painting was created for the front cover of Die Dame, a German fashion magazine aimed at affluent, sophisticated urban women.
Its circulation was wide and the impact was immediate.
The image caused a sensation.
Lempicka became famous almost overnight and portrait commissions flooded in from the wealthy elite.
The car itself is central to the message, and the composition may have been inspired by this photo showing a young actress posing in a Bugatti.
Alongside the glamour, speed and power of the car comes a hint of danger.
Let's look again at that dramatic billowing scarf.
In 1929, viewers would have remembered the dancer Isadora Duncan, who had died just two years earlier when her scarf became entangled in the wheels of a sports car.
As some historians have noted, there is a certain horror behind the perfection of images like this.
Machines are symbols of power and liberty, but also of danger.
Being in control of something dangerous was part of the point.
Lempicka makes a nod to images of the past where men have been shown in control of powerful steeds, and places herself in the role of the one in charge.
For all its glamour, the painting is really about control.
A woman who has placed herself firmly in the driving seat of modern life.
Lempicka's association with Art Deco created her success, but it later became a burden, as taste changed along with art styles.
It meant that she was forgotten about for decades.
Today, her paintings resonate once again because they anticipate a world where identity is constructed, curated and performed, and because they can still challenge assumptions.
Some describe her work as purely stylistic, a painterly expression of art deco elegance.
But to see it like this is to miss her deeper ambition.
She was trying to make something uniquely her own, and in doing so she was painting power, asking who gets to possess it and who gets to look.
After fleeing to the US at the onset of the Second World War, Lempicka moved to Mexico in the 1970s and died there in 1980.
Her dying wish was that her ashes should be taken by helicopter and scattered into a volcano.
A final theatrical gesture worthy of the persona she had so carefully constructed.
Throughout her life, she forged an identity and style that was uniquely hers.
As she once said with characteristic confidence among a hundred paintings, you could always recognize mine.
