Polish-American artist Tamara de Łempicka was BOTD in 1894. Born Tamara Gurwik-Górska in Warsaw to a wealthy family, she was sent to boarding school in Switzerland, joining St Petersburg society in her teens. In 1916, she married lawyer and socialite Tadeusz Łempicki, with whom she had a daughter, living in luxury until the Russian Revolution sent them into exile in Paris. Łempicka studied painting at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and then at the Académie Ranson, drawing inspiration from the Symbolist and Cubist art movements. In 1922, she exhibited her first major work Portrait d’une jeune femme en robe bleue (Portrait of a Young Woman in a Blue Dress), a disarmingly bold portrait of her lover Ira Perrot. She became the star of the 1925 Art Deco Fair with her sensual highly stylised portraits of women, typically bob-haired and wearing figure-hugging gowns. A dedicated socialite, she befriended celebrity lesbians Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West, Natalie Clifford Barney and Colette and had a well-publicised affair with nightclub singer Suzy Solidor. Her friendship (and possible affair) with Italian writer Gabriele d’Annunzio appears to have prompted her divorce from Łempicki. In 1929, she painted one of her best-known works, Autoportrait (Tamara in a Green Bugatti) for the cover of German fashion magazine Die Dame, personifying the Jazz Age ideal of a beautiful, independent and inaccessible woman. Her fame spread to America in the 1930s, where she was exhibited alongside Georgia O’Keeffe and Willem de Kooning and received a number of important commissions. In 1934, she married her lover Baron Raoul Kuffner, moving together to America at the outbreak of World War Two. Her opulent style fell out of fashion in the austere (and male-dominated) artistic climate of 1950s America, and she lapsed into obscurity, moving to Texas in 1961 after Kuffner’s death. In the 1970s, her work had a resurgence in popularity after a retrospective of her work in Paris and the re-discovery of Art Deco fashion. She settled in Mexico, dying in 1980 aged 81. Her work underwent a critical re-evaluation after her death, collected by celebrities including Madonna, Barbra Streisand and Jack Nicholson. Now considered one of the major female artists of the 20th century, she has been praised by art historians for her bold depictions of female and lesbian sexuality.