br This studio, housed in the only building in Paris built by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens, overlooks the gardens of the Cluny Convent. The light and open area, which conveys the true sensibility of an artist's working quarters, was once the home and creative space of the Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka, and as such played an important role in the popular culture of Paris in the interwar years.br br Lempicka, who was as famous for her social connections and scandalous affairs as she was for her work, painted in a bold, distinctive style that emphasized the cool sensuality of the Art Deco movement. A fixture of the bohemian life of Paris in the 1920s, she worked steadily through the Great Depression, but relocated to the United States in 1939 before the outbreak of World War II. By the 1960s, her style evolved to the exclusive use of the palette knife over brushes, lending a warmer, less precise quality to work that had once been sharp and exacting.