Tamara de Lempicka, the Queen of Art Deco Movement
Possessing uncompromising style, clarity and sensuality, Tamara de Lempicka (1894-1980) painted and lived her life to the fullest as a modern woman. The stunning exhibition at the de Young Museum (running through Feb. 9) is the first museum retrospective by an American institute. The exhibition not only documents the evolution of her artistic endeavors, but also an adventurous and unconventional life journey of an openly bisexual and cosmopolitan polyglot who lived glamorously through two world wars in European and American continents.
Born to a Polish family of Jewish descent as Tamara Rosa Hurwitz, she moved to Russia with her family in her childhood. She married Tadeusz Lempicki when she was 22, and gave birth to her daughter Kizette, her only child. Escaping the Russian Revolution, Lempicka fled to Paris in 1919 where she lived until the beginning of 1939. After her first marriage to Lempicki ended, she married Baron Raoul Kuffner in 1934 but kept her first husband’s last name. Poignant, sensual, yet polished and daring, Lempicka’s subjects included her family, friends and various female and male lovers, blending her training as a post-Cubist in early 1920’s, her study of European Old Masters, and the influence from Russian avant-gardes. During her Parisian era, Lempicka developed her singular glossy pictorial style characterized by figures of bold lines and geometric, angular shapes, sometimes against grey background of rising urban landscape made up of columns, cubes and wedges, highlighting the confident figures and contrasting female sensuality.
Lempicka left Paris for United States in early 1939 to attend her exhibition in New York. This trip helped her avoid the subsequent Nazi occupation of Poland and Paris. She became a darling of the Hollywood celebrities and lived in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1942. She became a US citizen and traveled between Europe and US. Even though her artistic acclaim declined, she continued with abstract and classic forms during the postwar period.
The examination of the artist’s drawings in the exhibition demonstrated Lempicka’s well planned design process. Per Curator in charge Furio Rinaldi, it was the acquisition of a drawing by Lempicka in 2021 named Jeune fille dessinant (Young Girl Drawing), “a slightly sinister portrait” of the artist’s daughter Kizette, that inspired the conceptualization of the first US retrospective. Surprisingly, it was discovered this acquisition by the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco for its Achenbach collection was the very first time a US museum actively acquired a work by Lempicka. However, securing 60 best paintings for the exhibition proved to be a major challenge as many of Lempicka’s work are in private collections. It took Rinaldi and his co-curator years to complete the collection through collaborations with 50 national and international lenders, including the Centre Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée des Beaux-arts de Nantes, Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans, Museo Soumaya in Mexico City, and many generous private collectors in North America and Europe including some of the biggest Hollywood stars such as Barbara Streisand.
The Centre Pompidou provided the iconic Young Girl in Green which was painted in 1931 and became an instant sensation upon its first exhibition and was immediately acquired by the French government for its nascent museum of modern art. Rinaldi identifies it as “perfectly expresses Lempicka’s signature style and captures a moment in time that her best works are known to represent (…) Young Girl in Green transcends its art historical importance because it is emblematic of an entire era: it encapsulates
the optimism for the future of the interwar years by paying tribute to the period’s dynamic ‘modern woman’”.
One hundred years after the first Lempicka exhibitions in Paris and Milan in 1925, which cemented Tamara de Lempicka as an Art Deco icon, the de Young revives her legend through a magnificent collection of artworks showcasing a modern, free, and glamorous life.