Tamara de Lempicka

Why should modern life be anything less than a high-speed chase in a green Bugatti? She was the "Baroness with a Brush," the queen of Art Deco who turned human skin into polished chrome and cold marble. "I live life on the margins of society, and the rules of normal society do not apply to those on the margins," she declared, painting with a precision that felt like a sharp intake of breath. She is the master of the sleek, the vertical, and the unapologetically wealthy. Her work is the visual pulse of the Roaring Twenties—glamorous, hard-edged, and utterly bored with the past.