Nov. 7, 2024
Tamara de Lempicka’s first major U.S. survey invokes her as a trailblazing techno-feminist who borrowed freely from art history. But it also buries her erratic second act.
Before Madonna strapped on her funnel-breasted bustier and called it feminism, there was the painter Tamara de Lempicka.
Her portraits of sculptural women and icy, querying aristocrats between the World Wars have become synonymous with the fierceness and decadence of Paris in the 1920s, when she found her first fame. Inheriting the last of Cubism, Lempicka developed a distinctive geometric realism that, despite its spot-welded austerity on the canvas, breathed jolts of humanity into her subjects, like the Tin Man’s achievement of a heart.
Barbra Streisand collected her in the 1970s. By the late ’80s, Madonna was quoting Lempicka’s sleek eroticism in her music videos and look. This spring, the Broadway musical “Lempicka” cast her as a feminist prophet singing lines like: “I created for myself something that the world had never seen. I painted what a woman could be.” (The musical closed after only 41 performances.)
A little worn out by now, this reputation of Lempicka the Liberator is both refreshed and challenged in “Tamara de Lempicka” at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the painter’s first major survey in the United States.
The show was curated by Gioia Mori, a Lempicka scholar, and Furio Rinaldi, a curator at the de Young. By turns swaggering, Sapphic and sensational, the 100 paintings and drawings deliver every inch of Lempicka’s luxuriant rigor, and they show us where the life pumps through it all.
Born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz in 1894, she grew up in Poland and claimed to have been born there. (Mori’s research casts doubt, and now the birthplace is unclear.) Settling in Russia at 20, by 24 she was fleeing the country’s revolution. Her husband, the lawyer Tadeusz Lempicki, was imprisoned briefly for his ties to the czar; Lempicka and their daughter, Kizette, awaited him in Paris.
While Tadeusz sold tapestries from his estate to stay afloat in Paris, his wife took classes with the Cubist painter André Lhote. Cubism is the loudest influence in her “Abstract Composition” (1920), a watercolor of bullet-like forms, and in “Street at Night” (1923), where streetlamps cast skirts of light like cones, everything a shape. She exhibited regularly at the Salon des Independents.
Commissions arrived. Her efficient early Cubist leanings — she took Lhote’s clean vocabulary and made it simpler and louder — combined with a sensual monumentality into some magnificent society portraits. Her whip-cracking control of the brush seems also to govern the people she rendered.
From 1926, “Grand Duke Gavriil Konstantinovich,” a fellow Russian exile, stands with his broad trunk bumping up against the margins of this tall canvas, a bitter dignity in his eyes and in the cocked planes of his chest and forehead. His royal uniform is a powerful bright red. But it’s useless in Paris, and Lempicka depicts the gold cords draped about his shoulders like spaghetti.
Tadeusz, her husband, stands coldly handsome and eyebrows arched in “Portrait of a Man,” a gray-on-gray canvas from 1929, hunkering against the skyline of New York, i.e. the future. Lempicka (pronounced lem-PIQUE-a) had just visited the city. The fingers of his right hand are sharp, bent cylinders; that handshake would sting. His other hand, the wedding-ring hand, is unfinished, roughed in with underpainting.
Unfinished because Tadeusz had left her, around that time, for his mistress in Poland. By the time of the painting’s execution, Lempicka was in full rock star mode, with tabloids following her through America as she painted industrialists’ wives. Among Tadeusz’s marital complaints were his wife’s fondness for cocaine, Wagner at full volume and lovers both female and male.
One of these lovers, the kohl-eyed French brunette Ira Perrot,swoons in a 1929 canvas with an armful of calla lilies, her red shawl breaking a background of Cubist grays like blood against stone.
A dozen more feminine types into the 1930s — driving, skiing, their wet eyes aimed upward in piety or boredom, ringlets and conical breasts gleaming like milled and paste-waxed aluminum — suggest Lempicka was devoted not just to her muses, or to the daughter she often painted, but also to a vision of femininity overtaking the now. Her self-portrait behind the wheel of a Bugatti appears in the show as a magazine cover she did for Germany’s first illustrated women’s magazine, Die Dame. The Lady, indeed.
The strange transgression behind her pictures lies in her many borrowings from art history, particularly that of Italy. Here is the show’s biggest favor to us. Rinaldi’s wall text explains that Lempicka’s fabulous line drawing “Embrace” (1928), where two bodies clip together as if one chain link fence, is a streamlined take on Giambologna’s sculpture “The Rape of the Sabine.” in Florence. Lempicka’s “Saint Teresa of Ávila” (1930) is an echo of Bernini’s sexualized nun in Rome, each fold in her habit as crisp as the 17th-century marble.
Lempicka was no trailblazer, it turns out. Like other Deco nostalgists, she was a good old-fashioned classicist.
But by squeezing her pictures through the past, Lempicka seems to have enjoyed the peculiar release of willful constraint. For example, Renaissance subjects are reliably erotic and easily invoked. In gender-benders like “Wisdom” (1940-41), Lempicka’s remix of a 15th-century van Eyck portrait, she seems like a sister to the Swiss-German painter Ottilie Roederstein (1859-1937), another modern who expressed a hardened lesbian gaze through Renaissance compositions.
Then there’s style, as Rinaldi explains in the catalog. After the chaos of Picasso and Braque — and the horrific First World War — many artists called for a “return to order” in their canvases. (Some equated that order with fascism.)
While Giorgio de Chirico painted his eerie classical landscapes in Italy, Lempicka, in her Paris paintings of the 1920s and ’30s, mined art history for the female anatomy, then polished it up to reflect a technologizing, feminizing world. At the de Young, you can almost hear her: Order? I’ll give you order.
The exhibition closes with her work from Los Angeles, where, fleeing the next World War, she moved in 1940 with her new husband, the aristocratic art collector Baron Raoul Kuffner, whom she married in 1934. Out of wartime necessity, Kizette joined them from Poland, though mother and daughter never became close.
In America, styling herself Baroness de Kuffner, she adopted a softer facture and humbler imagery more aligned with Depression-era America. The results on view, up to the year 1950, are mixed. “The Escape, or Somewhere in Europe” (1940) is a strong refugee take on Mary and baby Jesus. Several interiors and still lifes show her deepening control of paint and interest in the old masters. But none of the old confrontation. A New York Times review in 1941 called some of these works “oversweet” and “insipid.”
Easily wounded, Lempicka gradually retreated from the art world, the catalog notes. Interest in her work stalled until the revival of Art Deco in the 1970s. Cue Streisand, Madonna, the climbing auction prices. Her last 10 years straddle Texas, where her daughter lived, and Mexico, where she died in 1980, a glamorous widow. And that was that.
Was it? In this otherwise impressive show, there are just a handful of references to canvases from her erratic and exploratory last 30 years. That’s half her career.
In fact she kept painting — and exhibiting. Some of the work was alluring, and some kitsch. There were forays into messy palette knife paintings in the 1960s. Abstract composition in the 1950s, somewhere between Guy Dubuffet’s shards and Mavis Pusey’s construction sites. Landscapes, color studies and — a little tragically — copies of her iconic early work.
Was she on a vision quest? Lost? Bored? “Her inspiration and technical prowess waned markedly,” Rinaldi said in a statement. The exhibition, he said, would be the first time many viewers see her work, and one of the goals was to “protect the artist and present her work at its best.”
But the omission prompts questions: about the myth of peaking early, the duty of retrospectives. Succeeding commercially as an artist is very hard. It involves hammering out an identity while hiding the appearance of strategy. Museum exhibitions, by contrast, can respect that sense of destiny while considering the detours.
A sampling from Lempicka’s final decades could have posed those questions. As it stands, we must take the artist at her slightly self-aggrandizing but wisely circumspect word: “I was the first woman to paint cleanly, and that was the basis of my success,” she concluded late in life. “It was precise. It was ‘finished.’”
