Tamara de Lempicka valuation
Painted the 1920s in chrome, silk and hard light, and was rediscovered fifty years later.
Tamara de Lempicka was born Tamara Rozalia Gurwik-Górska in Warsaw, probably in 1894, and grew up between Poland and Russia.
What a work by Tamara de Lempicka is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Tamara de Lempicka was born Tamara Rozalia Gurwik-Górska in Warsaw, probably in 1894, and grew up between Poland and Russia. After the Revolution she and her husband Tadeusz Łempicki settled in Paris, where she studied with Maurice Denis and André Lhote, and out of Lhote's softened Cubism she made the smooth, metallic, sharply lit manner of her portraits and nudes. Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti, painted in 1929 for the cover of the German magazine Die Dame, is the image of her that everyone knows. She moved to the United States in 1939 with her second husband, Baron Raoul Kuffner, and her reputation faded until an exhibition in Paris in 1972 revived it. She died in Mexico in 1980.
The paintings of 1925 to 1935 are the heart of the market and are scarce; the later work, including still lifes and the palette-knife pictures of the 1960s, is a broader and more modest field. She is heavily forged, and the catalogue raisonné by Alain Blondel is the reference, so a painting outside it needs a documented history. The best-known images circulate as posters and prints, which are reproductions.
Milan, Hollywood and the Galerie du Luxembourg
Lempicka's first major solo exhibition was at the Bottega di Poesia in Milan in 1925. In the 1930s she painted portraits of European aristocrats and, after the move to America, of Hollywood society, and from the 1960s lived in Houston and then Cuernavaca.
The exhibition at the Galerie du Luxembourg in Paris in 1972 brought her work back into view, and much of what is known about individual paintings comes from the research that followed it.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
