Tamara de Lempicka's vibrant life and art

When you see a painting by Tamara de Lempicka, it’s hard to resist leaning in for a closer look. “It’s just exquisite,” said Furio Rinaldi, one of the curators of the first-ever Lempicka retrospective in the United States. “You don’t see the brush strokes. They are just polished and incredibly deliberate. It’s such a clean way of painting.”

These glamorous Art Deco works are now on display at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. [The exhibit travels to Houston this spring.]

So, what makes a painting so characteristically Lempicka?

“Geometrical shapes,” said Rinaldi. “Everything is reduced to essential forms. And the other aspect of Lempicka is that she sourced directly from examples provided by the European Old Masters. So, all these things blended together create a language that not only is entirely unique, but entirely modern.”

Born in 1894 in Poland as Tamara Rosa Hurwitz, Tamara eventually moved to St. Petersburg, marrying an aristocratic lawyer, Tadeusz Łempicki Junosza. In 1917, the Russian Revolution forced the couple and their young daughter to flee to Paris. “Paris was just recovering from the end of the first war,” said Rinaldi. “And there was a sense of hope for the future, and kind of a great faith for what was to come.”

In Paris, she began to paint, first out of financial necessity, using the name Lempicka.

Rinaldi said, “She captured that very exciting moment of empowerment and emancipation for the queer community in Paris.”

Some of the women she painted were her lovers. “The female body is not concealed or corseted as it was before in the previous decade,” said Rinaldi. “It’s celebrated in its shape.”

He described a painting of her lover, the poet Ira Perrot: “Eroticism with a sitter who’s not even looking at us. She’s just living in her own world. She has this gaze that is detached and completely cool.”

Each time Lempicka sold a painting, she made a purchase of her own: a diamond bracelet. According to Marisa de Lempicka, the artist’s great-granddaughter, it was for protection: “If she ever had to flee again, she could carry the bracelets with her. She could survive again.”

“She always had to think about saving herself?” I asked.

Yeah, herself and her family.

Indeed, her fears were well-founded. In 1939, before the outbreak of World War II, Lempicka and her second husband, a Jewish baron, fled Europe for the United States. She continued painting another four decades, until her death in 1980.

Asked if her great-grandmother had a sense of her legacy at the end of her life, Marisa de Lempicka replied, “She was the toast of the town in the Twenties and Thirties in Paris. She was extremely well-known. And then, she moved to the United States and, you know, the tastes changed. Abstract expressionism is in fashion, so she kind of falls out of favor.

“Why do you think we haven’t known her name and her story?”

“I think the fact she’s a woman artist,” Marisa said. “How many women artists can we name? You go to the general public? Very, very few.”

But Lempicka is now back in the public eye. Last year, she was the subject of a Broadway show, and her works continue to sell for millions of dollars. Collectors include Barbra Streisand and Madonna, who’s even featured Lempicka’s paintings in music videos.

Asked what she wants the public to know about Tamara de Lempicka, Marisa replied, “I hope people see her art, learn about her life, and feel empowered and inspired to live their own life and their own dreams. I know this is what Tamara would have wanted.”

      
For more info:

       
Story produced by Sara Kugel. Editor: Chad Cardin.