SAN FRANCISCO —Tamara de Lempicka at the De Young Museum is the first major American retrospective of the Polish-born artist, who lived and worked in Russia, France, the United States and Mexico during some of the most tumultuous decades of the 20th century. Synthesizing the artistic influences she encountered along her journey to create her own style, Lempicka’s art is instantly recognizable: part Cubist, part Futurist, part Art Deco, all glamorous and larger than nature. Even his small canvases radiate monumentality. His work and his life seem made for the big screen, and both have inspired film and stage productions. Itinerant during her lifetime, Hollywood was Lempicka’s true home.
Although this exhibition is understandably large – comprising some 120 works including paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs and fashion – it began with a single drawing. In 2021, when Furio Rinaldi, co-curator of the exhibition with Gioia Mori, was in the process of acquiring a drawing of Lempicka’s daughter for the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, he realized that No other American museum had ever purchased anything of this category. artist for its permanent collection (although some, like The Met, have donated his work). Likewise, no American institution had organized a comprehensive retrospective of his art. Rinaldi, who grew up in Italy, first discovered the artist’s work at an exhibition in Rome in the mid-1990s. He felt it was the right time for an American retrospective. No doubt, the timing is good. A eponymous Broadway show dedicated to the artist opened (and closed) in the spring of this year, and a new movie debuted in the fall. Lempicka – a twice-married, openly bisexual female artist who lived through two world wars and two continents – has an undeniably compelling biography. But that’s the least we can do.
As a painter, Lempicka’s technique is assured, coolly marrying synthetic cubism with 16th-century Italian mannerism and the gentle sensuality of Jean-Dominique Ingres. But movies also inevitably come to mind. The exhibition opens with a wall photograph of Lempicka looking out as you enter. This is the artist as starlet, self-consciously, as fashionable and charismatic as Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo. So it’s no surprise that Hollywood is an integral part of its history. Anjelica Huston performed it on stage and collects his work, as do Jack Nicholson and Madonna, who featured Lempicka’s works in a 1986 music video and lit up the stage during his final tour. Barbra Streisand even wrote the preface to the catalog for the current exhibition, explaining how she purchased her first Lempicka work in Paris in 1979 for $67,000, intended for an Art Deco screening room she was designing in Beverly Hills, because “she would be perfect there”. At least it was an impressive market forecast, considering that in 2020, Lempicka’s “Portrait of Marjorie Ferry” (1932) sold for $21.1 million at Christie’s.
Attraction to a certain type of beauty and style is one thing, but at this time in our history, encountering Lempicka’s art in person sometimes gave me an uncomfortable pause. While some portraits highlight his engagement with Italian art, such as the charming if somewhat banal “La Sagesse (The Wisdom)” (1940-1941), his most recognizable style includes large portraits of men and women intense with square shoulders. draped in planes of bright colors. These imposing architectural figures are often located within or adjacent to imposing cityscapes. Such paintings, like those of her future ex-husband, “Portrait of a Man (Thadeusz Łempicki) or Unfinished Portrait of a Man” (1928), and the “Portrait of Mrs. Rufus Bush” (1929), exude an Ubermensch loud via Ayn Rand vibes. So strong that when I googled Lempicka with Rand, what came up was the former’s painting of her husband as the cover of Atlas shrugged his shoulders. In fact, the LLC managed by Lempicka’s estate trumpets the fact that it licensed the artist’s work for “the books of famous writer Ayn Rand.”
Which is not to say that Lempicka shared Rand’s objectivist philosophy, political or otherwise, or that she engaged in the same façade of real fascism as filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, but still, Susan Sontag’s essay from 1975 “Fascinating Fascism” continued to come to mind as I passed by. from one disconcerting portrait to another. Lempicka probably wasn’t a fascist — she was actually a refugee from Hitler, of Jewish descent, even though she and her parents were baptized Christians — but the unshakable aesthetic connection to figures like Rand and Riefenstahl is impossible to ignore .
Lempicka also doesn’t gloss over his connection to Christianity, whether it’s the weeping nun in “Mother Superior” (1935) or the head of John the Baptist, or a strangely terrifying painted version from Bernini’s already exaggerated “Saint Teresa of”. Avila” (1930), somehow realized more, notably floating in its shiny silver Art Deco frame. (It’s worth saying that many of the frames in the exhibition are works of art in themselves.) For all the pathos intended by these religious pieces, they are mostly superficial. Shiny and decorative like Art Deco itself, and as superficial as a movie screen.
Where the work is strongest, most original and truly exciting is in the gallery titled “The Sapphic World”. Lempicka was famously, even unapologetically, bisexual, and the way she looked at her lovers and models was fresh and fierce. His best nudes eschew the vaseline shine and dewy eyes of so many of his portraits of women for voluptuous curves and breathtaking angles. “La belle Rafaëla (La belle Rafaëla)” (1927) is a view of her reclining lover painted ravishingly from below, as if the artist were on her knees. This is the fervor that his ostensibly religious subjects lack.
Tamara de Lempicka is a show worth seeing, with work that relies above all on questions of personal taste. It’s a bit like those big boxes of brightly colored candy you find in movie theaters. There may be a lot of things you don’t like, but when you find something you do, you want to devour it.
Tamara de Lempicka continues at the De Young Museum (Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, California) through February 9, 2025. The exhibition was co-curated by Furio Rinaldi and Gioia Mori.
