Tamara de Lempicka

Tamara de Lempicka was born Tamara Rozalia Gurwik-Gorska, most commonly dated to 16 May 1898 in Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire. Some English-language sources give an earlier birth year of 1894, and Britannica itself flags the date with a question mark, but the majority of specialist art references, national encyclopedias, and biographical databases converge on 1898.

Sent to a boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, in her early teens, she left before completing her studies. She is said to have begun art training as a teenager in Saint Petersburg before fleeing Russia for Paris around the time of the Russian Revolution, though this early training is not fully documented and partly rests on her own later accounts. In Paris she studied at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and later the Academie Ranson, under the Nabis painter Maurice Denis and the Cubist painter and critic Andre Lhote, who shaped the geometric, volumetric style for which she became known. No source documents a completed degree from any of these institutions.

Her public career began at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1922, followed by her first major solo exhibition in Milan in 1925. In 1927 she won First Prize at the Exposition Internationale des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux for Kizette on the Balcony, a portrait of her daughter, and she later received a bronze medal at an international exposition in Poznan, Poland, for another portrait of her daughter, Kizette at Her First Communion; sources place that medal between 1929 and 1931. She continued to paint and exhibit through the following decades, moved to the United States and later settled in Mexico, and died on 18 March 1980 in Cuernavaca, Mexico, at the age of 81 or 82 depending on the birth year used. Her estate reports that her ashes were scattered over the volcano Popocatepetl.

De Lempicka's reputation has moved from mid-century neglect to sustained institutional and critical attention, culminating in a major retrospective organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco that opened at the Legion of Honor and traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 2024 and 2025. Press coverage of the show generally treated it as overdue recognition for an artist who helped define the visual language of interwar modernity, pointing to the frank sensuality of her portraits and nudes as central to her renewed appeal. The retrospective followed decades in which her work was largely absent from major public collections, a gap that recent museum programming has begun to close.

Tamara de Lempicka's auction record is Portrait de Marjorie Ferry, a 1932 painting that sold for GBP 16,380,000 (about USD 21.2 million) at Christie's London on 5 February 2020, the current auction record for the artist and, at the time, was reported to be one of the highest prices ever paid at auction for a work by a woman. It surpassed an earlier record set only months before, when La Tunique Rose (1927) sold for USD 13.3 million at Sotheby's New York in November 2019.

More recent sales have stayed well below that peak. La Belle Rafaela (1927) sold for GBP 7.47 million (about USD 10 million) at Sotheby's London in June 2025, and Portrait du Docteur Boucard sold for GBP 6,635,000 at Christie's in 2025. Market commentary consistently treats these as strong results rather than new records, with the 2020 Marjorie Ferry sale still standing as her benchmark price.

De Lempicka's market is thin by the standards of a blue-chip name: only a small number of paintings change hands at auction in any given year, and prices depend heavily on subject matter, condition, and whether a work depicts her daughter Kizette or one of her signature nude or society sitters. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance research typically runs through the Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC, with market sources also citing Galerie Berinson in Berlin as a representative for works in the secondary market. Because her record price was set in 2020 and subsequent major sales have come in well below it, collectors should treat any single result as a data point shaped by a specific painting and moment rather than as evidence of a smooth upward trend.