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One of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s most intriguing and impressively comprehensive exhibitions of 2024 is “Tamara de Lempicka,” the first major U.S. retrospective of the glamorous, cosmopolitan Art Deco painter.
On view at the de Young Museum through Feb. 9, 2025, the exhibit is co-curated by FAMSF curator of drawings and prints Furio Rinaldi and Gioia Mori, a leading Lempicka scholar and professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome.
More than 100 artworks are organized into four sections, each shaped by movements Lempicka (1894-1980) made—geographic and artistic—in response to shifting personal relationships; influences of instructors, mentors, muses, spouses or lovers; acquisition and mastery of new technical skills, or world events. Art Deco objects, sculptures and dresses from the FAMSF collection add context.
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Revered worldwide for capturing the essence of Art Deco and having a profound influence on mid-20th century fashion and design practices and art, Lempicka continues to speak to contemporary pop culture icons. Today, her work resides in private collections of Madonna and Barbra Streisand, to name only two.
Lempicka’s best-known paintings feature her daughter Kizette, her husbands, or muses or lovers such as poet Ira Perrot, the model Rafaëla and Marquis Guido Sommi Picenardi.
“Kizette at the Balcony” (1927) has the young girl gazing dispassionately at the viewer. A child’s innocence and vulnerability are captured, with her open expression, the upturned palm of one hand resting on her thigh and the skew of her feet. With sleek folds in the silver dress and the city’s architecture rendered with obvious cubist Art Deco style, the painting sends multiple messages of poise and precarity.
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Another 1927 portrait, “The Beautiful Rafaëla (La belle Rafaëla),” is less subtle, and richly significant. The naked woman is absorbed in her own body and pleasure. Her eyes are closed, two fingertips feather-touch one breast, and her body’s hills and valleys are clearly but softly rendered in what might be described as a paintbrush’s caress.
Lempicka established her identity as a bisexual, free-spirited woman in Paris, where she took refuge following the 1917 Russian Revolution, creating increasingly sophisticated art works influenced by Russian avant-garde artists; 18th century Neoclassical painters like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and tutorship under French cubist painter André Lhote.
Born in 1894, named Tamara Rosa Hurwitz, she grew up in a Polish family of Jewish descent, lived in Russia as a child and married Tadeusz Łempicki in 1916.
Five years after divorcing Lempicki in 1929, she married Baron Raoul Kuffner de Dioszegh. Moving to the United States in early 1939, Lempicka escaped the Nazi occupation of Poland and Paris. While living in Beverly Hills and New York, she created the figurative paintings for which she is best known. She also refined still lives and interiors inspired by masters of Italian and Flemish painting.
“Weariness, (Lassitude)” (1927) is a stunning portrait of a woman seated on a chair. An olive-green background, square-neck brown dress shadowing into blackness, overlapping hands—the right seeming to pin the left in restraint—and bent neck posture illustrate a figure with fatigue. Even so, her gold and soft orange-tone hair is stylishly coiffed, the artist’s signature red lipstick is evident and her exaggerated arms are powerful. She may be forlorn, but she will never be unfashionable or forgotten.
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With an exhibit this marvelous in scope, it’s impossible to cover all the highlights, but some cannot pass without mention. Among them: “Her Sadness” (1923); “Escape” (1940); “Portrait of Ira P.” (1930) and “Sainte Thérèse d’Avila” (1930), a transposition of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s baroque sculpture “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.”
Interest in Art Deco in the 1960s brought Lempicka to an unprecedented level of visibility in the 1970s, attracting European collectors, Hollywood celebrities, art historians and critics. Lempicka lived in Los Angeles and later, in Texas with Kizette, the daughter from her first marriage. Making a final move to Cuernavaca, Mexico, she died in 1980 at age 81.
While the de Young retrospective offers novices a stunning introduction to the iconic cultural figure and Art Deco painter, it travels to unexplored territory for those already familiar with her while providing an exceptional opportunity to see the work firsthand.
“Tamara de Lempicka” continues through Feb. 9, 2025 at the de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco. Admission is $15 for youth (ages 6-17); $26 students; $32 seniors; $35 adult. Visit famsf.org.
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