In 1917, a pampered St. Petersburg socialite watched the Cheka drag her lawyer husband away in the night, then walked into a war zone to find him, secured his release, and fled across Europe with jewels sewn into her clothes. This episode tracks how Tamara de Lempicka rebuilt herself from refugee to the defining portraitist of the Roaring Twenties, and why her posthumous revival made her a pop culture phenomenon.

We examine her carefully curated origin story, including archival evidence that she was born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz, the childhood portrait she repainted herself at age ten, her training under Maurice Denis and André Lhote, the fusion of cubist backgrounds with neoclassical polish, the masculine signature Lempitzky, the standoff with Gabriele D'Annunzio, her affairs with Suzy Solidor and Ira Perrot, the marriage to Baron Kuffner, the  ...