An aura of mystery has surrounded Tamara de Lempicka since she was born, not in Warsaw in 1902, as she claimed, but according to official records in 1898 in Moscow. The beautiful and scandalous Tamara was the extravagant muse of Art Deco, an icon of the roaring twenties, and a successful painter of intensely sensual portraits that were powerfully sculptural with Cubist lines, embellished with sophisticated decorative elements. Cool colours, cramped spaces and stark contrasts between light and shade surround the unforgettable faces of rich, elegant, emancipated, and theatrical women fixed in their existential melancholy. The catalogue includes a careful selection of unforgettable paintings and valuable historic photographs offering us a fascinating thematic reconstruction of the personal and professional aspects of Tamara's life, including the places she lived, her involvement in the sophisticated fashion world of the period, and her studies of the nude, as well as her still-lifes and portraits.

This is the definitive catalogue on the first woman artist to be a glamour star. A cosmopolitan painter and icon of the Art Deco movement, Tamara de Lempicka created images that became the symbols of an era, the crazy 1920s and 1930s. She was possibly that periods most brilliant exponent. Driven by an iron will to achieve, Tamara not only cultivated her artistic talent, he also consciously built an image, that of an elegant and sophisticated woman, the extravagant protagonist of the European high life.