Digital image © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY)
SAN FRANCISCO —Tamara de Lempicka at the de Young Museum is the first major US retrospective of the Polish-born artist, who lived and worked in Russia, France, the United States, and Mexico in some of the most tumultuous decades of the 20th century. Synthesizing artistic influences she encountered along the way to create her own signature style, Lempicka’s art is immediately recognizable: part Cubist, part Futurist, part Art Deco, all of it glamorous and larger than life. Even her small canvases radiate monumentality. Her work and life alike seem made for the silver screen, and both have inspired film and stage productions. Peripatetic in her lifetime, Hollywood suits as Lempicka’s true home.
While this exhibition is understandably large — comprising some 120 works that include paintings, drawings, sculpture, photographs, and fashion — it began with a single drawing. In 2021, when Furio Rinaldi, who co-curated the show with Gioia Mori, was in the process of acquiring a drawing of Lempicka’s daughter for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, he realized that no other American museum had ever purchased anything by the artist for its permanent collection (though some, like The Met, have had her work donated). Likewise, no US institution had mounted a comprehensive retrospective of her art. Rinaldi, raised in Italy, first encountered the artist’s work in a Rome exhibition in the mid 1990s. He felt this was the right moment for an American retrospective. No question, the timing is good. An eponymous Broadway show dedicated to the artist opened (and closed) in spring of this year, and a new film debuted in the fall. Lempicka — a twice-married, openly bisexual woman artist who lived through two world wars and on two continents — boasts an undeniably compelling biography. But that’s the least of it.
As a painter, Lempicka’s technique is assured, coolly marrying synthetic Cubism with 16th-century Italian Mannerism and the smooth sensuality of Jean-Dominique Ingres. But the movies also come inevitably to mind. The exhibition opens with a wall-sized photograph of Lempicka staring out as you enter. It’s the artist as starlet, self-consciously so, as fashionable and charismatic as Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo. It’s unsurprising, then, that Hollywood is very much a part of her story. Anjelica Huston played her on stage and collects her work, as do Jack Nicholson and Madonna, who featured Lempicka’s artwork in a 1986 music video and illuminated onstage in her most recent tour. Barbra Streisand even wrote the catalogue preface for the current show, explaining how she bought 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 look perfect there.” If nothing else, it was impressive market foresight, considering that in 2020 Lempicka’s “Portrait de Marjorie Ferry” (1932) went for $21.1 million at Christie’s.
Attraction to a certain kind of beauty and style is one thing, but at this time in our history, encountering Lempicka’s art in person sometimes gave me uncomfortable pause. While certain portraits highlight her engagement with Italian art, such as “Wisdom (La Sagesse)” (1940–41), which is lovely if a little banal, her most recognizable style includes large portraits of intense, square-shouldered men, and women draped in planes of vivid color. These imposing architectonic figures are often situated within or alongside thrusting urban cityscapes. Such canvases, like those of her soon-to-be-ex husband, “Portrait of a Man (Thadeusz Łempicki) or Unfinished Portrait of a Man” (1928), and the “Portrait of Mrs. Rufus Bush” (1929), give off strong Ubermensch via Ayn Rand vibes. So strong that when I googled Lempicka along with Rand, what came up was the former’s painting of her husband as the cover for Atlas Shrugged. In fact, the LLC run by Lempicka’s estate trumpets the fact that they have licensed the artist’s work for “books by the renowned writer Ayn Rand.”
Which is not to say that Lempicka shared Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, political or otherwise, or committed the same fronting for actual fascism as filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, but all the same, Susan Sontag’s 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism” kept running in my mind as I passed from one discomfiting portrait to another. Lempicka was likely no fascist — she was, in fact, a refugee from Hitler, one with Jewish roots, though she and her parents were baptized Christians — but the unshakable aesthetic connection to figures like Rand and Riefenstahl is impossible to overlook.
Nor does Lempicka gloss over her connection to Christianity, whether it’s the crying nun of “Mother Superior” (1935) or the head of John the Baptist, or a weirdly terrifying painted version of Bernini’s already over-the-top “Sainte Thérèse d’Avila” (1930), made somehow more so, especially floating in its shiny silver Art Deco frame. (It’s worth saying that many of the frames in the show are works of art in themselves.) For all the intended pathos of these religious pieces, they are mostly surface. Shiny and decorative as Art Deco itself, and as shallow as a movie screen.
Where the work is strongest, most original, and genuinely thrilling, is in the gallery titled “The Sapphic World.” Lempicka was famously, even shamelessly bisexual, and the gaze she holds on her lovers and models is fresh and fierce. Her best nudes eschew the Vaseline sheen and dewy upturned eyes of so many of her portraits of women for voluptuous curves and breathtaking angles. “The Beautiful Rafaëla (La belle Rafaëla)” (1927) is a view of her reclining lover painted ravishingly from below, as if the artist were on her knees. Here is the fervor missing from her ostensibly religious subjects.
Tamara de Lempicka is a show well worth seeing, with work that hinges more than most on questions of personal taste. It’s a little like those big, brightly colored boxes of candy you find in movie theaters. There might be a lot 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 c0-curated by Furio Rinaldi and Gioia Mori.
