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.

Summoned by a wealthy American, Rufus Bush, to paint a portrait of his fiancée, De Lempicka made her first trip to New York. An article published two years earlier in Vanity Fair had prepared America for her arrival. She produced a number of paintings while there, including some studies of skyscrapers. She held exhibitions simultaneously in Poland (winning a bronze medal at the International Exhibition in Poznan), Paris (in four Salons and the Galerie Colette Weil) and the United States (at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh).

Dora Philippine Kallmus (1881-1963) was born in Vienna. She first worked in Austria with Benda (the inventor of a long (soft) focus lens which she herself would frequently use). Thereafter, she did photos for Die Dame magazine (between 1920 and 1936), opening her own studio in Paris in 1924 (which she would keep until 1940). She did a great number of portraits for customers the likes of Somerset Maugham, Marc Chagall, Gordon Craig, the Fratellinis, Colette, etc. She worked for L'Officiel de la Couture et de la Mode until 1939.