Tamara de Lempika

Tamara de Lempika (1898 to 1980) was the finest Art Deco painter (my opinion) and one of the few painters from the time who worked successfully for most of her career. She was independent, tough, smart and marvelous. Her portraits of the aristocracy, the noveau riche and the fabulously well-to-do were commissioned for the equivalent of $20,000 in today's dollars.

Her biography, "Tamara de Lempika: A Life of Deco and Decadence," although unfriendly fire, has some terrific plates in it, and it is still possible to admire her work, if not her choices, after reading it.

She was bisexual and a practicing, painting voluptuary, which produced excellent paintings and a wild, busy and chaotic life, which not all appreciated.

She was a superb painter, was masterful at acquiring patrons, and had a glamorous life and business in Europe and after 1939, in Hollywood as painter of the stars. After 1943, when her popularity diminished she painted still lifes, and took up the palette knife, as her acclaim subsided. After 1962, she gave up painting altogether. Although the Baronness lived long enough to see a resurgence in interest in her work, she didn't enjoy her later years. But what a life she lived as a legend in her own time.