Enigmatic, glamorous and unapologetically ambitious, Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka took Paris by storm in the 1920s with her glossy portraits and sensual, stylized nudes, soon becoming one of the leading artists of the Art Deco era. A model of the “modern woman,” strong, savvy, bold and independent, Lempicka understood the power of personality, celebrity and reinvention. “There are no miracles,” she has been quoted as saying. “There is only what you make.”
Early on, her paintings were collected by performers, artists, designers and others in the arts, and when her work was rediscovered in the 1970s, Hollywood stars, including Barbra Streisand, Jack Nicholson and later Madonna, got into the act. Just last year her life and art were the subject of the Tony-award-nominated Broadway musical Lempicka, and she has recently been profiled in a feature-length documentary, The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & The Art of Survival.
Currently, a major retrospective of her work, the first mounted in the United States, is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through May 26. Conceived by Gioia Mori, the preeminent scholar of Lempicka’s work, and Furio Rinaldi, curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where the show premiered last fall, “Tamara de Lempicka” features more than 90 paintings and drawings that showcase her distinctive style and unconventional life.
“Tamara de Lempicka’s paintings united classicism and high modernism to create some of the most defining works of the Art Deco era,” says Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. With their foundation in Cubism and the aesthetics of modernity, the angular forms and polished surfaces of her images are the very epitome of the Art Deco style. The term for the designation comes from the 1925 International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Art in Paris, which launched a revolution in product design, furniture, fashion and architecture in the United States and Europe.
Young Girl in Green (Young Girl with Gloves), circa 1931, oil on board. (Photo credit: Centre Pompidou, purchase 1932, inv. JP557P. © 2024 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC / ADAGP, Paris)
A lover of fashion, Lempicka unstood the importance of appearance and couture. “She was a powerful woman,” relates her granddaughter Cha Foxhall in an interview for the exhibition’s audio tour. “She had a very strong presence. When she walked into a room, every head would turn because of her strong energy, and also, of course, because she would always be fabulously well-dressed…When there’d be a group of people, she would be the center.”
Lempicka was born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz in Poland, most likely in Warsaw, in 1894, during a time of violent antisemitism. Her Jewish parents had converted to Christianity before she was born in an effort to assimilate, and she early learned to hide her Jewish ancestry. She met her future husband, prominent lawyer and Polish aristocrat Tadeusz Lempicki, at a costume ball. Dressed as a peasant girl, she enhanced her role in characteristic dramatic style by bringing along a live goose. The couple married circa 1916 and lived for a time in Saint Petersburg.
Portrait of Ira P., 1930, oil on panel. (Photo credit: ARS, NY. Private collection. c 2024 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY. Image © 1969 Christie’s Images Limited.)
In 1917, at the beginning of the Russian Revolution, Tadeusz was arrested and imprisoned by the Cheka, the secret police, for allegedly spying for tsarist networks. With help from the Swedish consul, Tamara was finally able to secure his release and the couple, along with their young daughter Kizette, fled to Paris. The family survived for a while by selling the jewelry they were able to smuggle out, but with Tadeusz unable to find work, Tamara turned to earning a living through art. She soon became immersed in Paris’s café society and free-wheeling art scene. Tadeusz, however, was apparently unhappy in Paris and with his wife’s new lifestyle. They divorced in 1928. That same year, Lempicka met the man who would become her second husband, art collector Baron Raoul Kuffner.
In Paris, Lempicka studied first with Symbolist painter Maurice Denis and then with French Cubist painter André Lhote. By 1922 she had developed her own personal style, characterized by bold lines and angular shapes. She first exhibited her paintings in Paris at the Salon d’Automne in 1922 under the name “Monsieur Lempitzky,” a male version of her last name, in part to be taken seriously in a male-dominated field, but also as a reflection of her own fluid sexual identity. Later signing her works as “Tamara de Lempicka,” she transformed the primarily male tradition of portraying the female nude into something wholly new.
An adroit businesswoman, Lempicka acted as her own manager. She used family and friends as her subjects, as well as romantic partners, both lovers and husbands. In 1927, a painting of her daughter, Kizette on the Balcony, won First Prize at the Exposition Internationale. Kizette’s maternal grandmother had reportedly warned the young girl: “Well, you know, sit still, because someday you might be in a museum.”
Lempicka kept the fact of her Jewish ancestry secret for her entire life, even painting a portrait of her daughter in her First Communion dress to make sure she was identified as Catholic. One of the reasons Lempicka urged her second husband, Baron Kuffner, who was also of Jewish descent, to leave Europe was that she knew the Nazis would be violent in their attacks against Jews. In 1939, Lempicka and Kuffner left Paris for the United States, settling in California. In time, Kizette was able to join them.
The peak of Lempicka’s renown was in the 1920s and 1930s with her arresting portraits and imposing nudes. In the 1940s, she turned to painting more traditional and subdued still lifes and interiors. By the 1950s, her popularity had faded, and by the end of the 1960s, her work was almost forgotten. In 1972, however, a Paris gallery reintroduced her art and brought Lempicka back into the limelight. Her works hang in the Centre Pompidou in Paris and are coveted by collectors, says Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, “for their magnetic appeal, exquisite pictorial technique and flawless draftsmanship.” In 2020, one of her paintings sold for 16.3 million pounds ($21.1 million) at Christie’s London. “She has a knack for the magical image that will stick in your memory,” wrote artist Francoise Gilot in an article for Vogue Paris. “Her draftsmanship caresses, embraces and sometimes sets afire.”
After the death of her husband in 1961, Lempicka established a home in Houston to be closer to her daughter and granddaughters. In the 1970s, she moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Barbra Streisand, who first discovered the artist’s work in Paris in 1979, writes in her preface to the exhibition catalog that Lempicka was a woman ahead of her time who refused to be bound by convention. Streisand relates that before the artist died at her home in Cuernavaca in 1980, she asked that her ashes be scattered on Popocatepetl, a volcano in central Mexico. “She always,” says Streisand, “understood the power of an image.”