[5][6][7] She briefly moved to Saint Petersburg where she married Tadeusz Łempicki, a prominent Polish lawyer, then travelled to Paris.

In 1928, she became the mistress of Baron Raoul Kuffner, a wealthy art collector from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, divorcing Tadeusz Łempicki that same year.

[10] Her father was Boris (born Benno)[11] Gurwik-Górski, a Russian-Jewish attorney for a French trading company,[9][12][13][14] and her mother was Malwina Dekler, a Polish-Jewish[15][16] socialite who had lived most of her life abroad and who met her husband at one of the European spas.

[18] Tamara was raised in Warsaw by her mother and grandparents, Bernard and Klementyna Dekler, who were members of the social and Polish cultural elite – they were friends with Ignacy Jan Paderewski and Artur Rubinstein.

Her family offered him a large dowry, and they were married 30 December 1915 in a Roman Catholic church in Tsarskoye Selo (earlier studies claimed a 1916 marriage in the chapel of the Knights of Malta in St.

Lempicka decided to become a painter at her sister's suggestion, and studied both at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts and Académie de la Grande Chaumière with Maurice Denis and then with André Lhote, who was to have a greater influence on her style.

[30] In 1927, Lempicka won her first major award, the first prize at the Exposition Internationale des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, France, for her portrait of Kizette on the Balcony.

He commissioned her to paint his mistress, the Spanish dancer Nana de Herrera; after its completion, Lempicka and the baron began their relationship.

[23] She bought an apartment on rue Méchain in Paris and had it decorated by the modernist architect Robert Mallet-Stevens and her own sister Adrienne de Montaut.

[32] In 1929, Lempicka painted one of her best-known works, Autoportrait (Tamara in a Green Bugatti), for the cover of the German fashion magazine Die Dame.

This showed her at the wheel of a Bugatti racing car wearing a leather helmet and gloves and wrapped in a gray scarf, a portrait of cold beauty, independence, wealth, and inaccessibility.

She traveled to the United States for the first time in 1929 to paint a portrait of Joan Jeffery, the fiancée of the American oilman Rufus T. Bush, and to arrange a show of her work at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.

She painted portraits of King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen Elizabeth of Greece and museums began to collect her works.

In 1933, she traveled to Chicago, where her pictures were shown alongside those of Georgia O'Keeffe, Santiago Martínez Delgado, and Willem de Kooning.

[37] She became alarmed by the rise of the Nazis and persuaded her husband to sell most of his properties in Hungary and to move his fortune and his belongings to Switzerland.

The Paul Reinhard Gallery organized a show of her work, and they moved to Beverly Hills, settling into the former residence of the film director King Vidor.

She expanded her subject matter to include still lifes, and in 1960 she began to paint abstract works and to use a palette knife instead of her smooth earlier brushwork.

[38] Baron Kuffner died of a heart attack in November 1961 on the ocean liner Liberté en route to New York.

[45] In 2005, the actress and artist Kara Wilson performed Deco Diva, a one-woman stage play based on Lempicka's life.

[8][48]She was one of the best-known painters of the Art Deco style, a group which included Jean Dupas, Diego Rivera, Josep Maria Sert, Louis Lozowick, and Rockwell Kent, but unlike these artists, who often painted large murals with crowds of subjects, she focused almost exclusively on portraits.

Her first teacher at the Academie Ranson in Paris was Maurice Denis, who taught her according to his celebrated maxim: "Remember that a painting, before it is a war horse, a nude woman or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order".

[49] Her other influential teacher was André Lhote, who taught her to follow a softer, more refined form of cubism that did not shock the viewer or look out of place in a luxurious living room.

[48] Lempicka combined this soft cubism with a neoclassical style, inspired largely by Ingres,[50] particularly his famous Turkish Bath, with its exaggerated nudes crowding the canvas.

Lempicka's technique, following Ingres, was clean, precise, and elegant, but at the same time charged with sensuality and a suggestion of vice.

[52] After the mid-1930s, when her Art Deco portraits had gone out of fashion and "a serious mystical crisis, combined with a deep depression during an economic recession, provoked a radical change in her work",[27] she turned to painting more traditional subject matter in the same style.

[53] Of these, art historian Gilles Néret wrote, "The baroness's more 'virtuous' subjects are, it must be said, lacking in conviction when compared with the sophisticated and gallant works on which her former glory had been founded".

[58] In the 1920s, she became closely associated with lesbian and bisexual women in writing and artistic circles, among them Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West, and Colette.

[61] Madonna has featured Lempicka's work in her music videos for "Open Your Heart" (1987), "Express Yourself" (1989), "Vogue" (1990) and "Drowned World/Substitute for Love" (1998).

Other notable Lempicka collectors include actor Jack Nicholson, singer-actress Barbra Streisand, and fashion designer Wolfgang Joop.

[73] The documentary includes newly found archival evidence regarding Lempicka's birthdate and the Hurwitz family's conversion from Judaism to Calvinism.