Although you may not be familiar with the name Tamara de Lempicka, if you've watched Madonna's videos "Open Your Heart," "Express Yourself," and "Vogue," you've seen a few of her paintings. Lempicka (1894-1980) is the Polish artist known for her classical Art Deco style with their symmetrical, rectilinear sleek geometrical forms and urban landscapes with luminously colored portraits of aristocrats, writers, entertainers, artists, scientists, and exiled nobility of the 1925-1935 period.
She also created powerful sensual female nudes that challenged gender norms and "encapsulated the glamour, transgression, and cosmopolitan effervescence of Paris in the years between the world wars."
Lempicka's first major US retrospective, with more than 120 works, is dedicated to the artist's full oeuvre (also drawings and experimental still lifes) currently at the de Young Museum. A few of The Fine Arts Museums' collection of Art Deco objects, sculptures, and dresses are included to provide some historical context.
This exhibition is the San Franciscan art event of the year. It is presented chronologically in four major chapters marking the stages in Lempicka's life through her changing identity.
Masculine, feminine
Born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz to a Polish Jewish family in Warsaw, she grew up in St. Petersburg where she met her first husband, lawyer Tadeusz Lempicki. After the Russian Revolution, they fled to Paris, where she was determined to become the most important artist in the city.
To support her and Tadeusz, she began painting. She became a huge critical and commercial success, signing her early works under the masculinized Lempitzky to gain social acceptance. After their divorce, she took the feminine declension Lempicka.
With the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism, she emigrated to Beverly Hills with her second husband, Baron Raoul Kuffner, and became tagged as the baroness with the brush. But after World War II, her work fell out of favor. With the resurgence of Art Deco interest in the 1970s, her talent was rediscovered. In her later years she moved to Mexico where she died in 1980.
Bisexual, she had both male and female lovers. She summed up her own philosophy of living on her own terms: "I live life in the margins of society and rules of normal society don't apply to those who live in the fringe."
Capturing the social changes in society, she was ahead of her time in every way. She's now become a symbol of strength, resilience, and survival amidst the chaos of the 20th century, embraced by today's pop culture.
"Tamara is the most known unknown artist," according to her great granddaughter Marisa.
Renewed popularity
In recent years her popularity has soared. Notable collectors beside Madonna include Barbra Streisand, Jack Nicholson, and fashion designer Donna Karan. Earlier this year, a Broadway musical "Lempicka" inspired by her life, was nominated for three Tony awards. In 2020, her 1932 painting, "Portrait of Marjorie Ferry" was auctioned at $21.2 million.
Several of her paintings in the show merit comment. "Male Nude" (1924) is one of the few naked portraits she did of men, lent by its owner Harvey Feirstein.
"Young Girl in Pink" (1928-29) is her daughter Kizette wearing a fashionable tennis outfit.
"The Communicant" (1928) features a spiritual Kizette receiving her first Communion, done to disguise the family's Jewish ancestry in the face of rising anti-Semitism.
"Her Sadness" (1923) captures her long-time female lover Ira Perrot, wearing a slightly oversized coat, frowning, with a penetrating gaze.
"The Beautiful Rafaela" (1927) lent by composer Tim Rice, is a sex worker/lover Lempicka met in a Parisian garden. Her naked body is lying down done in a perspective from below, as she's not looking at the viewer. She's self-absorbed in her own pleasure, revealing the unabashed power of female sexuality.
"Spring" (1930) captures two nude women, possibly Tamara and Ira Perrot, embracing next to a lush bouquet of white lilacs. "The Girls" (1930) represents another sapphic portrait of two girls holding each other, covered by a blue fabric.
"Portrait of a Man (Tadeusz Lempicki, 1929)", her first husband, presents an elegant image of masculinity, with his neck wrapped in a beautiful pearl grey scarf and black trench coat set against the background of skyscrapers. They divorced while she was painting him, so the left hand, where his wedding ring would be, was intentionally left unfinished.
"Portrait of Marquis Guido Sommi Picenardi" (1925) was an avant-garde Futurist musician. He was married but bisexual. He had an affair with Lempicka. She depicts the handsome marquis as a sophisticate, wrapped in a fur-collared overcoat, hair glistening with pomade, a glacial coldness in his magnetic gaze.
The piece de resistance of the exhibition is "Young Woman in Green (Young Woman with Gloves," (1931) that typifies the "modern woman." Her conical breasts, curved hips, and deep navel are swathed in a green fabric, her eyes shaded with the edge of a wide-brimmed hat. She seems to look beyond the frame towards the future, epitomizing feminine freedom.
Defying convention
Her female portraits, often of convention-defying women, reflected the optimism of her era when women were starting to experience greater social and economic freedom. She painted them as independent, successful, and in charge of their lives.
She was the first woman artist to paint female nudes, celebrating and owning their sexuality and cool voluptuousness. She created her own elegant brand, a genius at self-promotion. Today she would be an Instagram star, as she was a skillful manipulator of the media.
I asked the co-curator Furio Rinaldi whether it was her life or her work that is now beguiling the world. He insisted the aim of the exhibition is to showcase her artistry, not design, fashion, or hedonistic lifestyle. But with Lempicka, you can't separate the two, because her captivating personality/biography is reflected in her artwork.
In her own words, "I was the first woman to paint clearly and that was the basis of my success. Among a hundred paintings you can always recognize mine. Galleries began to hang my work in the center because my painting was attractive; it was precise, it was finished."
The catalogue entitled "Tamara de Lempicka" edited by curators Furio Rinaldi and Gioia Mori (Yale University Press), with a preface by Barbra Streisand and background biographical and art historical essays from a few scholars, is worth the $65.00, with gorgeous reproductions of the entire exhibit. The book will be a permanent memento of what will likely be a milestone art show, obligatory viewing, in establishing Lempicka as one of the significant female artists of the 20th century.
'Tamara de Lempicka' at de Young Museum through February 9, 2025, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, Golden Gate Park.
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