Tamara de Lempicka

An icon of the Jazz Age, the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka lived a life well worth recording, and until this book no one had written it. She was a great beauty, an aristocratic refugee of the Russian Revolution, and a frankly erotic painter who insisted on Renaissance aesthetics, figuration, and painterly craft in the middle of modern art.

Laura Claridge draws on exclusive access to Lempicka's family, friends, and archives to reconstruct the life the painter carefully withheld even from her own daughter: the truth of her birth; her escape from Bolshevik Russia; her determination to become a New Woman; her lifelong bouts of depression; her affairs with the women and men she painted; her flight from Nazi Europe by way of Havana; and her years in Hollywood and New York as the "Baroness with a brush."

The book is also an argument. The prices Lempicka's canvases now command have not dispelled the suspicion that a woman of her glamour and notoriety could not have been a serious artist — yet reviews from the 1920s routinely set her work against the major figures of the School of Paris. A Life of Deco and Decadence, published in 1999, is the first critical biography of the painter, and it takes the life and the paintings equally seriously.