Tamara de Lempicka

Born in Warsaw in 1894 as Tamara Rosa Hurwitz, she married a Polish lawyer, moved through Saint Petersburg, and landed in Paris, where she studied with Maurice Denis and André Lhote. Her work - a blend of refined cubism and neoclassical lines borrowed from Ingres - made her a fixture of the city's artistic life between the wars. In 1928 she took Baron Raoul Kuffner as her lover, divorced her husband, and married Kuffner in 1934 after his wife died, earning the press nickname "The Baroness with a Brush". When war broke out in 1939 she and Kuffner fled to the United States, where she painted celebrities and still lifes, then tried abstracts in the 1960s. Her work fell out of favor after the war, revived only when Art Deco came back in the late 1960s. She moved to Mexico in 1974 and died there in 1980; her ashes were scattered over Popocatépetl.