'Tamara de Lempicka' Review: An Art-Deco Doyenne at the De Young
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco presents the first major American exhibition devoted to the Polish painter, who brought blazing, geometric style to her canvases.

San Francisco

American museums have largely ignored the work of Tamara de Lempicka (1894-1980). Her glossy, glamorous, instantly recognizable portraits, which conjure the fashionable 1920s, have been shown at European institutions. Celebrities like Madonna and Jack Nicholson collect them, and her "Portrait de Marjorie Ferry" (1932) fetched $21.1 million at Christie's in 2020. Yet this Polish artist, who in 1917 fled from her birthplace and early life in Russia to Paris and then in 1939 to the U.S., until now has never had a major monographic exhibition here. Even more surprising, when in 2022 the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco—whose De Young branch is presenting "Tamara de Lempicka"—purchased a drawing, it was the first U.S. museum to buy a work by her (others own works that were donated).

"Woman With Dove"

The explanation partly lies in her blazing Art Deco aesthetic, a style whose popularity peaked in the 1920s and '30s but faded, deemed decorative, as abstraction and other nonfigurative styles took hold. The Fine Arts Museums' Furio Rinaldi, curator of this retrospective along with author Gioia Mori, also cites gender bias and distaste for her unconventional lifestyle as a confident, twice-married, promiscuous bisexual woman who painted provocative pictures, especially her sexually charged female nude ensembles.

But, as illustrated by this exhibition, which runs through Feb. 9, 2025, there's no denying Lempicka's talent. Consider her alluring, nude "Woman With Dove" (1931), all golden or tan tones except for her pursed red lips, polished fingernails and white bird. Or her "Young Girl in Pink (Kizette in Pink II)" from about 1928-30: Crunched up in a chair with an open book, dressed in a pleated tennis outfit, Lempicka's daughter eyes viewers as if they are interrupting her. Or her dazzling "Young Girl in Green (Young Girl With Gloves)" from about 1931, which shows a green-eyed woman in a revealing dress, with a cascade of fluttering folds at her shoulder and golden curls spilling from beneath a broad-brimmed hat. She epitomizes the free-spirited belief in modernity that characterized the interwar years in Paris and which Lempicka's best artworks capture.

"Young Girl In Green"

Lempicka herself introduces the exhibition, which includes more than 150 paintings, drawings, period objects and fashions, in a blown-up 1932 photograph that shows her in three-quarter view, a hat pulled down to the eyebrow of her visible eye. It's a smart move, because the first gallery displays only some unexceptional early works alongside a few by a teacher, the Cubist painter André Lhote.

Moving on, viewers will see Lempicka's unique style take shape, inspired by forebears like Botticelli, Giambologna, Ingres, Courbet and Cezanne, references that casual viewers who appreciate her works for their visceral appeal may have missed. To create her bold, geometric, volumetric style, Lempicka borrowed from Mannerism, neoclassicism, Cubism and, of course, Art Deco, of which she has been dubbed "the queen." Her intense "Saint Teresa of Ávila, After Gian Lorenzo Bernini" (1930) features a face and veil nearly as chiseled as his masterpiece sculpture (1647-52). "Woman With Dove" parallels Rosalba Carriera's "Allegory of Chastity" (c. 1727). When Lempicka drew "Study for 'The Round Dance (La Ronde)'" (c. 1932), she was looking at Parmigianino's "Madonna of the Long Neck" (1534-35).

"Young Girl in Pink"

Yet she has her own ways of creating various effects. The girl's blouse in "The Straw Hat" (1930) appears to be diaphanous not in the meticulous method of Botticelli, but because she smeared the paint, hinting at peachy skin underneath. Her seductive nudes pay little attention to the viewer. Rather, as the risqué "The Beautiful Rafaëla in Green" (1927), depicting a woman in ecstasy, shows, they are focused on their own erotic pleasure. These works, the catalog says, were made specifically for women interested in same-sex desire.

Ever restless, Lempicka often seemed to be probing her own identity. Born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz to parents of Jewish descent who had converted to Christianity, she took her first husband's surname yet signed some early works with the masculinized "Lempitzky" to conceal her gender. She then Frenchified her name, adding the ennobling "de," and in 1934, when she married a Hungarian Baron, she called herself "Baroness Kuffner."

Thus, despite her lifestyle, several paintings have devout Christian subjects, such as her demure "The Communicant" (1929), which depicts her daughter, eyes heavenward, enveloped in white, with a dove lifting a corner of her voluminous veil. Her roots are clear in "Still Life With Russian Doll (Hyacinth)," from about 1924, and "The Polish Girl or Kizette with a Polish Shawl" (1933). She obliquely refers to her history fleeing political danger in "The Refugees (of Spain)" from 1931.

"The Refugees"

The exhibition concludes with a surprise: a gallery of still lifes and interiors, much like those painted by Flemish or Italian Old Masters and with no trace of Art Deco. She even signed two in an old-fashioned scrolled cartouche. They are splendid.

Lempicka's last exhibition occurred in 1957, more than 20 years before she died. She kept painting, but Mr. Rinaldi, who left those works out of the exhibition, said her works showed a marked deterioration in quality. She was no longer producing the gleaming, sculptural, frame-filling images that make this retrospective powerful.