Reintroducing Tamara de Lempicka, the High Priestess of Art Deco

One of the great joys of visiting museum exhibitions, especially retrospectives, is the possibility of discovering something new about an artist you think you know well. (An uncharacteristic plexiglass sculpture in an Andy Warhol show was particularly destabilizing for me.)

Even more thrilling is taking a chance on an artist you’ve never heard of — and getting your socks knocked off.

I have a feeling I’m not going to be the only one having their first encounter with Tamara de Lempicka, whose incredible life story (and savvy self-marketing) could overshadow the work of a less assured artist. At the de Young, her first American museum retrospective is a stylish, persuasive argument for her rightful place in interwar art history, as well as a fascinating look at how her glamorous career ended. Turns out it’s possible for someone who once defined modernity to fall out of step with their own time.

The chronologically arranged show begins with Tamara Rosa Hurwitz, the artist’s first of many identities. Born in 1894 to Polish parents who converted from Judaism to Christianity before her birth, she enjoyed a cosmopolitan childhood, including frequent trips to France and Italy. In 1916, in Saint Petersburg, she married Tadeusz Lempicki, a Polish lawyer with ties to aristocratic Russian families. Unlike many in their circle, they initially stayed put during the 1917 revolution, but after Tadeusz was imprisoned by the Soviet secret police, Lempicka and their daughter Kizette fled for Paris, eventually securing his release.

It was only in Paris that de Lempicka began her artistic career, in part out of financial necessity. She quickly surpassed her tutors. At the de Young, her early still lifes, life drawings and studies of renaissance art are made of fluid graphite lines — foundational compositional elements that bring an angular grace to her oil paintings. Her drawings of sculptures, especially, hint at her tendency to render flesh as a mass of cold, idealized forms. Eyes are cloudy or glassy, like the blank, convex surfaces of polished marble.

1920s Paris was a heady time for de Lempicka, who soon established herself in artistic and expat circles and exhibited in numerous salons. She also did a lot of cocaine, frequented clubs and bordellos, took valerian to fall asleep, had affairs, and painted while listening to Wagner at full volume. (In 1927, seemingly fed up, Tadeusz left on a business trip to Poland and did not return.)

de Lempicka developed a unique amalgamation of renaissance, neoclassicist, cubist and avant-garde styles. The timing was right. In 1925, the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris, mainstreamed the Art Deco aesthetic: luxury and glamour paired with a belief in technological progress. Many of de Lempicka’s portraits of modern aristocracy depict her sitters against backgrounds of prismatic grays that later give way to towering skyscrapers.

Even some of her most organic shapes, like a girl’s ringlets, end up looking like the curled shavings of machined metal, so extreme are her transitions from light to dark. de Lempicka’s paintings pack high drama into tight compositions, and the de Young has appropriately lit and spaced some of the show’s most stunning paintings into vignettes of their own.

Despite her singular painting style, de Lempicka had plenty of muses and places from which she routinely borrowed imagery. Of the former, Kizette was one (introduced throughout her life as de Lempicka’s sister); her neighbor and lover Ira Perrot was another. Illustrated wall text makes it easy to compare renaissance paintings or classical sculpture with de Lempicka’s own takes on these sources. Helen Dryden, the most famous and well-paid fashion illustrator of the time, was obviously a role model.

de Lempicka’s women are stony, impeccably dressed, twisted into dynamic poses and — when nude — sensuously rendered. In a section of the show devoted to her sapphic nudes, La belle Rafaëla (1927) depicts a woman lost in her own pleasure, her body a smooth expanse of curves and shadows.

Blame World War II and her relocation to the United States, blame her depression and a turn toward religious imagery, but de Lempicka’s work was never quite the same after she left Paris in 1939. Her final assumed identity was that of a high-flying, party-throwing “baroness with a brush.” She married Baron Raoul Kuffner de Diószegh in 1934, a collector whose mistress she painted in the late ’20s and soon replaced.

American critics praised her “flawless technique,” the visual art equivalent of saying a writer is “good on a sentence level” (skilled, but ultimately, not great). Even so, the final rooms of the de Young’s exhibition come as a shock. The colors are off, her deep shadows go missing and the subject matter is all over the place. At the Opera (1941) looks like it was made by someone else: the garish portrait of a frilly-dressed woman is a far cry from the languid, androgynous coolness of Portrait of Mrs. Rufus Bush (1929).

Country still lifes, paintings of peasants — none of it sticks. After the war, she posed for fashion photographer Willy Maywald in her Parisian apartment, looking like the Ghost of Christmas Past. Clearly, she was no longer au courant.

Somewhere between countries, identities and world wars, de Lempicka lost touch with the fickle currents of the art world. By the 1960s, after several failed attempts to reestablish her career, she retreated into the society pages of Houston and New York. But before she died in 1980, she did experience a rediscovery of sorts. As interest in Art Deco grew, her work was included in shows chronicling the ’20s and ’30s. The first scholarly publication on her work came out a few months after her death. Ever the diva, she decreed that her ashes be scattered over the volcano Popocatépetl.

Despite the sleekness and sensuality of her strongest work, there’s no tidy way to tell de Lempicka’s story (a recent Broadway musical tried and failed), which may be part of the reason why she wasn’t part of my art historical education. I, and I’m sure many others, missed out. As curators Furio Rinaldi and Gioia Mori diligently demonstrate, she was a rigorous and inventive artist, worthy of both this show and the substantial catalog that accompanies it.

While efforts like this push her name closer to the international renown she always sought, the most immediate use of this show is as a master class in self-fashioning. Anyone seeking a lesson in louche disinterest — and the poses that best convey a sense of unattainable cool — need look no further than de Lempicka’s modern women.

‘Tamara de Lempicka’ is on view at the de Young Museum through Feb. 9, 2025.