Unidentified photographer, Tamara de Lempicka at home in New York, c. 1943, Tamara de Lempicka Estate
Tamara de Lempicka at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, promises glamour and Art Deco elegance in its advertising and upon your entrance into the exhibit. The space opens with her biographical overview and an enlarged, wall-sized vogueish photograph of the artist. Her presence is asserted more so than her artworks before you enter through the aforementioned photograph and various films (some of her painting, some not), along with more magazine model-like photographs outside the exhibition walls. Her biography is repeated on the walls, mentioned on wall labels, and included on the museum’s website: “While she reveled in her avant-garde sensibilities and openly conducted affairs with both men and women, she simultaneously concealed her Jewish ancestry as she evaded persecution in her native Poland, escaped Russia following the Soviet revolution, and ultimately fled Europe in 1939.” My recent research has focused on Jewish American identity and erasure in sixties art; this line drew me to the exhibition.
The museum’s opening didactic wall label describes how her Polish family, due to experiences of intense anti-Semitism, concealed their Jewish identity. The wall label uses the term “assimilated” to describe how the artist used various forms of the period’s avant-garde style to make “her own distinctive style.” “Masks” and “carefully crafted…public image” pervade. While perhaps I learned more about an artist undergoing a contemporary revival through the biographical details included in various labels, finding her within the artworks themselves was harder. Her lovers, men and women, are painted and included — the eroticism with which she makes women’s bodies her subject is made visible. Some aspects of her identity are possibly revealed (and reiterated in wall labels).
Tamara de Lempicka, “Portrait of Ira P.,” 1930, oil on panel, private collection. © 2024 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY. Image © 1969 Christie’s Images Limited.
Her work’s artifice and theatricality exploit the trends of Art Deco and her influences from Mannerism (and the Renaissance) to Pablo Picasso and Cubism. The Cubist trends are often visible in her backgrounds and cityscapes. Picasso’s Neoclassical period is pointed to as the influence for works such as Weariness (Lassitude) from 1927. Those connections are clear; her elongated blocks of arms further embolden a monumentality of the body. However, a peculiarity pervades this work and others.
Another example is Irene and Her Sister (1925), a double portrait of the artist’s cousins, one that promoted the artist and Art Deco in Vanity Fair in 1927, and a work seen by Lempicka as “launching” Art Deco. The monumentality of each woman fills the canvas, neither giving the viewer much credence by looking away. Both are dressed in nice clothing, which seems out of place in a forest. One sister’s blond hair is impossibly long, accentuating the distinctiveness of the portrait.
Tamara de Lempicka, “Young Girl in Green (Young Girl with Gloves),” c. 1931, oil on board, Centre Pompidou, purchase, 1932, inv. JP557P. © 2024 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY. Digital image © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN- Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY
Her connections to Mannerism and modernity (a topic also discussed in the exhibition catalog) are where her works create the most vivid parallels, exploiting both the artifice inherent to the Mannerist movement and the surreal qualities of modern life. Bodies become solid like the machines and steel buildings surrounding city life. In addition to her studies of works by Pontormo and other early modern artists, in practically all of her portraits, hands are rendered awkwardly. The accentuated curves and the lack of modeling in other aspects of many works make continual connections to Mannerism. Young Woman in Green (Young Woman with Gloves), c. 1931, is perhaps the best-known work in the exhibition; the woman wears a green dress that drapes closely to her body, particularly her chest and torso, accentuating in detail her body underneath. The bend of her torso and the “wet drapery” effect make art historical references to Hellenistic sculpture and the clothing which becomes like a skin to the body reminded me of Pontormo’s Entombment (1525-1528). Yet, she is also very modern — wearing on-trend fashion and within a modern cityscape. Her ringlets of hair, which repeat as a style in other images of women such as The Girls (1930) and Spring (1930), appear as unnatural corkscrews or solid spirals of ribbons. Each of these works is soaked in a kind of languid lushness through their bright colors, semi-closed eyes, and an assured pose. In The Girls, the eye color of one of the “girls” matches the draped fabric the other one wears and is, somehow, the same color as some of the sides of the buildings. Modernity, in all its strangeness, seeps in and takes over.
Tamara de Lempicka, “Saint-Moritz,” 1929, oil on panel, Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, inv. no. 76.12.1. © 2024 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY.
There is often an exploitation of paint and material to accentuate the flatness of the subjects throughout her paintings; however, Lempicka also challenges her own style. In paintings such as Portrait of Marquis Guido Sommi Picenardi (1925), she uses her brush marks to create a material sense of fur on the canvas. Additionally, she produces a similar maneuver in Saint-Moritz (1929), when her marks create tufts of snow, and in The Straw Hat (1930), where the lush petals push forth from the painting with their impasto. In other moments, such as Portrait of Prince Eristoff (1925), the portrait fits many of the influences and modern avant-garde practices previously outlined. Yet, passages such as the sweep of purple paint, bifurcating his cane, and the vertical greyish brushstroke across the Cubist-style background, interrupt an easy understanding of the work.
Tamara de Lempicka, “Still Life of Fruit and Draped Silk,” 1949, oil on canvas board, Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, gift of Luis Aragón, 1986, inv. no.1986.174. © 2024 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY
Lempicka’s still-lifes create an interesting dynamic with the prevalence of figures within the exhibition. This may be because she paints people as a kind of object, a form to manipulate within her practice (this is not a negative point, as this is perhaps a baseline definition of many artistic approaches), but it does mean objects themselves pop with an eccentric wonder. Bouquet of Violets (c. 1927), Still Life with Cauliflower (c. 1924-25), Arums (1931), or Arums (Still Life with Arums and a Mirror) (1938), render flowers or vegetables in odd and wonderful ways. Bouquet of Violets uses perspective to make a Cezanne-ian shift of planes, and she crops the work to further force the flowers into the viewer’s space. In Arums (Still Life with Arums and a Mirror), the flowers appear as solidly formed (if still destabilized within the space) as the ornate small mirror’s frame. Their shadows create a murky glow around them. Arums also appear in Portrait of Ira P. (1931), a portrait of Ira Perrot, an important lover and muse to the artist. The twirl of the white spathe rhymes with the curves, drapes, and folds of Perrot’s dress.
The exhibition strives to set a scene for the viewer, including Art Deco decorative objects, sculptures by other artists, and clothing among the paintings. The frames stand out as accentuating the work held within and creating a sense of how these works would have occupied the homes of her collectors. The artist in her paintings remains mostly elusive, which appears to have been her goal.
“Tamara de Lempicka” is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The exhibition is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from March 9 through May 26, 2025.
