Tamara de Lempicka was born Maria Gorska in turn-of- the-century Poland. In 1914 at the age of 16, she married a lawyer named Taduesz Lempicki in fashionable St. Petersburg. After her husband was arrested by the Bolsheviks, Tamara braved the Russian Revolution to free him and the couple of leld to Paris where the story of Tamara de Lempicka's fantastic life really begins.

Now known as Tamara de Lempicka, the refugee studied art and worked day and night. She became a well-known portrait painter with a distinctive Art Deco manner. Between the wars, she painted portraits of writers, entertainers, artists, scientists, industrialists, and many of Eastern Europe's exiled nobility.

At the threat of a second World War, she left Paris for America. She went to Hollywood, to become the "Favorite Artist of the Hollywood Stars". She and her second husband, Baron Raoul Kuffner, one of her earliest and wealthiest patrons, moved into American film director King Vidor's former house in Beverly Hills.

When the war was over, she reopened her famous Paris studio. After the Baron's death in 1962, she moved to Houston to be near her daughter Kizette. She began painting with a palette knife, much in vogue at the time. The Iolas Gallery in New York exhibited her newest and latest paintings in 1962, but the critics were indifferent, there were not many buyers, and she swore to herself that she would never exhibit again.

Gradually, as Art Deco and figurative painting came into favor again, she was rediscovered by the art world. In 1978 she moved to Mexico permanently, buying a beautiful house in Cuernavaca called Tres Bambus. She despaired of growing old and in her last years sought the company of young people. She mourned at the loss of her beauty and was cantankerous to the end. Tamara de Lempicka died in her sleep on March 18, 1980 with her daughter Kizette at her side.