Paris (1918–1939) In Paris, the Łempickis lived for a while from the sale of family jewels. Tadeusz proved unwilling or unable to find suitable work. Their daughter, Maria Krystyna "Kizette", was born around 1919, In 1929, Lempicka painted one of her best-known works,
Autoportrait (Tamara in a Green Bugatti), for the cover of the German fashion magazine
Die Dame. This showed her at the wheel of a
Bugatti racing car wearing a leather helmet and gloves and wrapped in a gray scarf, a portrait of cold beauty, independence, wealth, and inaccessibility. In fact, she did not own a Bugatti automobile; her own car was a small yellow Renault, which was stolen one night when she and her friends were celebrating at La Rotonde in
Montparnasse. She traveled to the United States for the first time in 1929 to paint a portrait of Joan Jeffery, the fiancée of the American oilman Rufus T. Bush, and to arrange a show of her work at the
Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. The exposition was a success, but the money she earned was lost when the bank she used collapsed following the
stock market crash of 1929. The portrait of Jeffery was completed but put into storage following the couple's divorce in 1932. It was sold by
Christie's in 2004 following the death of Joan (now Vanderpool). She became alarmed by the rise of the Nazis and persuaded her husband to sell most of his properties in Hungary and to move his fortune and his belongings to
Switzerland.
The United States and Mexico (1939–1980) In the winter of 1939, following the outbreak of World War II, Lempicka and her husband moved to the United States. They settled first in Los Angeles. The Paul Reinhard Gallery organized a show of her work, and they moved to
Beverly Hills, settling into the former residence of the film director
King Vidor. Shows of her work were organized at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York, the Courvoisier Galleries in San Francisco, and the Milwaukee Institute of Art, but her shows did not have the success she had hoped for. Her daughter Kizette was able to escape from occupied France via Lisbon and joined them in Los Angeles in 1941. Kizette married a Texas geologist, Harold Foxhall. In 1943, Baron Kuffner and de Lempicka relocated to
New York City. In the postwar years, she continued a frenetic social life, but she had fewer commissions for society portraits. Her art deco style looked anachronistic in the period of postwar
modernism and
abstract expressionism. She expanded her subject matter to include still lifes, and in 1960 she began to paint abstract works and to use a palette knife instead of her smooth earlier brushwork. She sometimes reworked earlier pieces in her new style. The crisp and direct
Amethyste (1946) became the pink and fuzzy
Girl with Guitar (1963). She had a show at the
Ror Volmar Gallery in Paris in May and June 1961, but it did not revive her earlier success. Baron Kuffner died of a heart attack in November 1961 on the ocean liner
Liberté en route to New York. Following his death, Lempicka sold many of her possessions and made three around-the-world trips by ship. In 1963, Lempicka moved to
Houston, Texas, to be with Kizette and her family and retired from her life as a professional artist. She continued to repaint her earlier works. She repainted her well-known
Autoportrait (1929) twice between 1974 and 1979;
Autoportrait II was sold, though she hung
Autoportrait III in her retirement apartments, where it would remain until her death. The last work she painted was the fourth copy of her painting of St. Anthony. In 1974, she decided to move to
Cuernavaca, Mexico. After the death of her husband in 1979, Kizette moved to Cuernavaca to take care of de Lempicka, whose health was declining. De Lempicka died in her sleep on 18 March 1980. Following her wishes, her ashes were scattered over the volcano
Popocatépetl. ==Rediscovery==