Tamara de Lempicka (1898–1980) was a Polish-born painter best known for sleek, stylised portraits that came to define the Art Deco look. Raised in Warsaw and St Petersburg, she left Russia after the Revolution and settled in Paris, where she studied with artists including André Lhote and developed her distinctive, polished style, clean lines, bold colour and a cinematic sense of poise.
Her sitters were often society figures, actors and patrons, whom she painted with cool glamour and a modern edge. The best-known image of her career is Self-Portrait (Tamara in a Green Bugatti) (1929), a declaration of independence and speed that became an emblem of the era. In the 1930s she married Baron Raoul Kuffner and later moved to the United States, living between New York and California. After the war her star dimmed for a time, and she experimented with more abstract work, but interest in her Art Deco portraits returned from the 1960s onwards.
She spent her final years in Mexico and died in Cuernavaca in 1980. Today, de Lempicka is celebrated for capturing the confidence and elegance of early 20th-century modern life.