The newspaper Paris-Midi of February 24, 1939, makes mention of the artist: "Tamara de Lempicka bids good-bye to Paris, where she yesterday boarded the SS Paris headed for New York."
Once in New York, she put on two shows, a first one at the Paul Reinhardt Gallery in May 1939, and a second at the Julian Levy Gallery in 1941.
September 1941 found her off to California, to San Francisco and then on to Los Angeles, the cities to which Julian Levy had made her show travel. At that point, she and her husband decided to rent King Vidor's residence in Beverly Hills (Los Angeles), where they stayed until 1942, the year they returned to New York. The couple also took possession of a country house in Westport, Connecticut.
At the war's end, Lempicka frequently "commuted" between Italy, France (where she had kept her rue Méchain studio), and the United States, not to mention numerous side trips to Cuba and Mexico.

Never had an artist been so preoccupied with her own image as Lempicka: she herself did many self-portraits, and, more especially, spent hours to sitting for photographers, where she would take on the attitude of a professional model. Her long stay in Hollywood, and all her efforts to penetrate the movie world, suggest that she longed to be in the "spotlight". Her "screen test" - with the newsreel producers Pathé in 1932 - shows a supremely self-assured image of her coming down the staircase of her rue Méchain studio, flourishing a seemingly endless cigarette-holder.

The 1941 show moved to los Angeles, where a new gallery belonging to Julien Levy opens on Sunset Boulevard. After an exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Center, the Kuffners moved to New York, where they bought an imposing two-storey apartment at 322 57th Street. Her painting at this time took its inspiration from natural world around their country house in Connecticut, and she produced a series of still-lifes. In New York she devoted her energies to her social circle, yet poor health undermined her efforts.

In March 1939, Lempicka arrived in New York, along with her latest paintings. She had also brought along several of her large-scale classics - such as "The Musician" (B.117) - which she planned to display together with the new works. Despite the hassle of settling in and preparing several shows (in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Milwaukee), she managed to find time for several very ambitious creations, such as "Wisdom" (B.221) and "At the Opera" (B.222), which she had started before leaving.
After her last exhibition at the Julian Levy Gallery of Los Angeles, in 1941, the spread of war relegated such mundane events as opening receptions to the sidelines. Consequently, Lempicka withdrew to her country house in Connecticut. Here, she devoted herself to a series of still lifes comprised of commonplace objects, vegetables and fruits, affording her occasion to attain a state of peace far removed from the era's upheavals. She became less sharply precise, attending more to the solidity of her compositions, and using skilfully gradated contours to build up rounded volumes, which nonetheless retain their fullness. Once back in New York, where, given the times, no further portrait commissions were forthcoming, she painted portrait after portrait of idealized young women, gradually defining the norms of a model-face that would become somewhat of an obsession (cf. the series with turban [B.254, B.262]). In parallel, she continued her still lifes, adorning them with drapes in a most classical spirit, or even in a trompe l'oeil vein. At the same time, she began doing copies of works by the Renaissance masters.
With the return of peacetime, Lempicka took painful stock of the changes wrought in all realms; in the realm of art, these could only cut her off even more from the mainstream. In January 1949, she left for Italy, where she spent six months. From then on, Lempicka would become a perpetual commuter between New York, Paris, Florence, Capri, Zurich, Monaco, Marrakech, and more.