Who Was Tamara de Lempicka, and Why Was She Important?

I’m going places, Tamara de Lempicka seems to be saying in Tamara in the Green Bugatti, her iconic 1929 self-portrait. And I’ll be driving there myself. Showing the artist decked out in a Hermès doeskin cap and gloves and driving a luxury Bugatti car, the painting limns an elegantly self-fashioned woman of the Roaring Twenties.Artistically active for six decades, Lempicka was only in the limelight during the 1920s and 30s; interest in her then faded but was rekindled after her