Tamara de Lempicka was born as Maria Gorski, daughter of an upper class family, in Warsaw on May 16, 1898. She spent her youth in Lausanne and with her relatives in St. Petersburg. In 1916 she married the lawyer Tadeusz Lampicki in St. Petersburg. In 1918 she fled from the Russian revolution to Paris together with her husband and her family. In Paris, Tamara de Lempicka tried to find a lucrative activity and wanted to be integrated into Paris society, both of which she achieved through portrait painting. Art had been part of her education as member of the upper class and Tamara was enthusiastic about the paintings she had seen on her travels at an early age. In the fall of 1922 Tamara and her sister Adrienne attended the first exhibition of her pictures at the 'Salon d'Automne'. In order to integrate better into upper-class French society, Tamara added the French 'de' to her name. Until 1925 de Lepicka experimented with ways of writing her signature. Using the male form of her name, she pretended to be a male artist. In late 1925 de Lampicka had her first solo exhibition in Milan, where she also appeared as a woman. In the 1920s the aritst took painting lessons at the 'Académie Chaumière', with Maurice Denis and André Lhote. Tamara de Lempicka mainly concentrated on paining portraits and images. Her oeuvre includes only few still lives, cityscapes and abstract compositions. De Lempicka painted members of the Eastern European upper-class, who lived in exile in Paris. The most successful phase in de Lempicka's career ended around 1935. Her painting lost its metallic character and flattened formally as well as with regard to its contents. In 1939 the artist emigrated to the US with her second husband, the Hungarian baron Raoul Kuffner, where they lived in Beverly Hills, before moving to New York in 1943. After the war, Tamara de Lampicka temporarily returned to Paris. After her husband died in 1962, she finally moved to Houston, Texas, where her daughter Kizette lived. From the late 1950s, Tamara de Lempicka tried Abstract painting and in the early 1960s she created spatula pictures which appear late-Impressionist. However, these pictures remained unsuccessful. A 1966 exhibition on art of the 1920s in Paris and a monographic retrospective, which had been organized by Alain Blondel in 1972, re-awakend interest in Tamara de Lempicka's pictures. In 1978 she moved to Mexico. Not wanting to accept her age, she sought the proximity of youth. Tamara de Lempicka died on March 18, 1980 in Cuernavaca, Mexico.