At Long Last, A Tamara De Lempicka Retrospective In The U.S.

Tamara de Lempicka (1894-1980) would have been hard to miss. Blonde bombshell. Making the scene. Life of the party. “Ravenously promiscuous.” Dressed head to toe in couture. Brilliantly talented as a portraitist. Breathtaking portrayals taking the aesthetics of Art Deco to painting. No one else did that. A singular style instantly recognizable for its line and color.

Yet somehow, call it a quirk of American museological art history or a total failure of connoisseurship, Lempicka has never received a full-blown retrospective in the U.S. Until now. San Francisco’s de Young museum goes all out with “Tamara de Lempicka,” an exhibition as grand as its subject. Stemming from its recent acquisition of a drawing by Lempicka, a portrait of her daughter Kizette on view now to the public for the first time, the de Young splurges with more than 150 artworks including rarities from Europe and loans from private collections never previously exhibited in America.

Why hasn’t this magnificent artist received more attention? Why isn’t she better known?

“We should ask instead, why isn't she better known in the United States,” Furio Rinaldi, exhibition co-curator and curator in charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, told Forbes.com. “In Europe, Lempicka ranks among the most well-known artists of her generation, on the level of Frida Kahlo. Her work was exhibited in important retrospectives at London's Royal Academy, Vienna's Kulturforum and the Palazzo Reale of Milan. In the United States, from the early 1980s, Lempicka had enjoyed increasing commercial success, both at auction and among a passionate group of private collectors, but her works classified a sort of phenomenon of decoration and fashion pertaining to the Art Deco period. This exhibition aims to reassess her defining role within the development of the international modernist movement.”

Weird thing about Art Deco. As celebrated as the movement continues to be in architecture–including San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge–jewelry, fashion, design, and illustration, in fine art, its largely invisible. Swallowed up by Cubism and Surrealism, perhaps.

“At a time when museums in the United States and indeed around the world are reconsidering the art historical canon, and artists whose work has been understudied because of outmoded theories and methodologies, the time was right for Tamara de Lempicka’s first major United States retrospective,” Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Director Tom Campbell told Forbes.com. “The luminous, neo-mannerist style that Tamara de Lempicka developed in the 1920s was as distinctive as the artist herself, and 100 years later, both Lempicka’s work and her biography continue to enthrall us.”

That biography was purposefully kept opaque by the artist in her lifetime. Research coinciding with the exhibition definitively determined for the first time her birth year, Polish Jewish heritage, and birth name, Tamara Rosa Hurwitz.

Art Imitating Life

Decadent. Luxurious. Cool. Sexy.

Champagne and cocaine.

Lempicka was the Bugatti she famously portrayed herself in for the cover of German fashion magazine “Die Dame:” Self-Portrait on a Green Bugatti. Powerful. Glamorous. That iconic work is in the de Young show.

She was Madonna before Madonna. The Material Girl a devout fan and collector of Lempicka’s, herself a material girl from another age. Through her liberal and fabulous lifestyle, Lempicka has become synonymous with the carefree spirit and opulence of the 1920s.

Her delicious biography cannot be separated from her chops as an artist. She was the embodiment of the portraits she produced. Her muses, her husbands, her lovers–Lempicka was bisexual–the European and American jet set. Even portraits of her young daughter read a little too titillating for comfort. Art imitating life.

The exhibition presents the evolution of Lempicka’s artistic style and full sweep of her career including poignant and experimental still lifes from early Parisian years and melancholic domestic interiors, but it’s the Jazz Age, Art Deco, Roaring Twenties portraits where she’s in her groove, cracking home run after home run–right on the screws.

These pictures offer a unique and captivating blend of classicism and modernism. Statuesque. As if painted with marble.

“Lempicka's process is extremely methodical and deliberate and can be roughly outlined as follows: Lempicka started her compositions with blocking her ideas on paper through rough sketches which she then refined in its figural elements through more developed drawings as well as full-scale cartoons (the type of large-scale drawing used to transfer a design from paper to panel),” Rinaldi explained. “Once on the panel (or canvas) to be painted, the composition was built up through very thin and smooth layers of painting which helped her achieve the extremely polished, almost enameled finish of her works.”

Icy cool. Fashion model cool. Unapproachable cool.

Her sitters are often depicted with far-away eyes, a combination of the religious images painted by her beloved Italian Renaissance and Mannerist artists and contemporary Hollywood studio photography–think Marlene Dietrich.

Portraits not designed primarily to reveal their subject’s inner vulnerability, rather their carefully constructed external facades. An armor in a sense.

Her portrait of first-husband Tadeusz Łempicki depicts him thusly, more building than man. Classic Art Deco. Angular, linear, massive, his figure hidden behind a heavy overcoat. Notice the unfinished left hand. The couple’s relationship was unraveling at the time she painted this portrait, his wedding ring is left out of the finished artwork. This painting is in the show, too.

Coming (Back) To America

Lempicka first visited the United States in spring of 1929, arriving in New York before traveling on to Santa Fe and San Francisco. In San Francisco, she exhibited in 1930 at the then-renowned Galerie Beaux Arts.

“She greatly enjoyed the entirely American concept of the cocktail party which she brought to Paris upon her first sojourn in New York,” Rinaldi said.

A window into the soul.

In February 1939, she returned to attend an exhibition organized in New York. This trip saved her from witnessing the tragic Nazi occupation of Poland and her then-hometown of Paris. During this visit to the U.S., Lempicka lived in Beverly Hills–where else?–and New York City. She eventually joined her daughter Kizette (married surname Foxhall) in Houston.

As much as the 20s were her decade, the 30s and 40s were not. Her lifestyle and perception of the world were not suited to depression, hunger, fascism, and war. She was an artist of Bugatti’s and bobs, not bread lines and bombs. Following the cataclysms of World War II, artists sought a new “language” to express the times. That would be Abstract Expressionism.

Lempicka’s art making didn’t keep up. She was in, but not of, the nuclear era.

“Artistically, the last twenty years were rather erratic. Her technique, once flawless, and inspiration declined markedly,” Rinaldi said. “She stopped exhibiting after three unsuccessful attempts in 1941 (in San Francisco, New York and L.A.), and then again in 1957 (in Rome) and 1961 (in Paris), and started experimenting, rather capriciously, with different genres–abstraction, surrealism, landscapes–and techniques (like) palette knife paintings. She even tried to replicate her own works from the 1920s and 1930s.”

Nothing worked.

The times would have to change to bring Lempicka back into fashion. That occurred in the mid-1970s–disco–when she was rediscovered as an Art Deco icon.

Lempicka’s life and art were one in the same. Fortunately, her life and career were not.

“The ever-flamboyant Tamara lived large almost up until the end of her life: the long sojourns in Paris, Venice and Rome were alternated by her retreat in Cuernavaca where she was accompanied by her close friend and confidante, the local socialite Emanuel Contreras,” Rinaldi added.

She died in her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1980.

In addition to Lempicka at the de Young, art lovers in San Francisco are also treated to another pair of powerhouse female painters with an exhibition for Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s Legion of Honor through January 26, 26, 2025, and Amy Sherald (b. 1973) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a presentation including her iconic portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, on view through March 9, 2025.

“Tamara de Lempicka” travels to Houston for display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from March 9 through May 26, 2025, after leaving San Francisco.

More From Forbes