Story by Stephanie Levin.
When I rave about the first major US retrospective of Tamara de Lempicka at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, many respond with a befuddled expression before the question: “Who is Tamara de Lempicka? I’ve never heard of her,.” That isn’t an easy question to answer. Tamara de Lempicka defined the Art Deco painting of her generation, a grande coup for a woman in a field demarcated and dominated by male painters. Competitive, driven, and immensely talented, Lempicka was an iconoclast, an outlier, and a portraitist, living life on her own terms. Her paintings are sensual, unconventional, and as polished as she was.
Tamara Rosa Hurwitz was born to Malwina Dekler and Benno Hurwitz, both of Jewish descent. Amid anti-Semitism in Poland, Tamara’s parents converted to Christianity before their daughter’s birth on June 28, 1894. Tamara’s actual place of birth remains a mystery. Was it Warsaw, Moscow, or Saint Petersburg? What isn’t mysterious is that through her wealthy grandmother in Saint Petersburg, Tamara traveled and discovered the European Old Masters. In 1911, she attended a masked ball in Saint Petersburg as a peasant Polish girl where she met Tadeusz Lempicka, a Polish lawyer rumored to have aristocratic ties. They married in 1916, and quickly had a daughter, Kizette. The family enjoyed a privileged lifestyle until the Bolsheviks took charge in 1917, deposing the monarchy and leading to the arrest of Tadeusz. Tamara and her daughter escaped. The family reunited in Paris two years later, but times remained challenging. As a displaced aristocrat, Tadeusz remained moody and unemployed. Lempicka, however, was determined to succeed as a professional artist and enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Highly disciplined, she absorbed the work of the old masters. Her most influential mentor, however, was André Lhote, a cubist painter and critic. Impressed by cubism’s unique deconstruction of form, Lempicka added cubist geometric form throughout her portraits.
Lempicka thrived in Paris and renamed herself Tamara de Lempicka, which had a more aristocratic ring. This was the 1920s; life was fantasy and frenetic, and Lempicka effortlessly identified with the trendsetting Parisians. Openly bisexual, Lempicka began a long-lasting affair with poet Ira Perrot, who served as a model in Lempicka’s early portraits. The artist joined ‘women only’ literary salons featuring Gertrude Stein, Colette, Anais Nin, and consorts with the elite Parisian artistic circle. Portrait commissions poured in. Savvy as she was talented, Lempicka capitalized on her connections. With her razor-sharp focus, flawless brushstrokes, translucent skin tones, cubist influence, and overt sensuality, Lempicka created a unique niche for her portraiture.
Independent and carefree, Tamara exhibited regularly in Paris, signing her early portraits ‘Lempitsky’, the masculine declension of her husband’s surname. Was it a manner of defining her bisexuality or due to the difficulty women artists faced in the male art world? It’s all conjecture. What is not conjecture is that Lempicka continued to have artistic success as her domestic life unraveled. Tadeusz had little tolerance for his wife’s lifestyle and affairs, and Kisette had been relegated to boarding school.
In 1925, the Parisian Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes introduced Art Deco to the world. Lempicka opened her first solo exhibit in Milan at the Bottega di Poesia Gallery to mixed revues the same year. Her nudes, design, and draftsmanship were praised, but her interpretation of Cubism was not. Undeterred, the artist continued to refine her paintings.
By 1927, Tadeusz no longer tolerated his wife’s affairs or lifestyle. He left on a trip to Poland and never returned. They divorced in 1928. Lempicka’s career soared; she received accolades for the portrait of her daughter, Kisette, and began collaborating for the Berlin fashion magazine Die Dame, translated as The Lady.
In July of 1929, Die Dame featured a Portrait of Lempicka in a Green Bugatti highlighting the contemporary woman, or as the New York Times coined the painting, “Steely-eyed goddess of machine age.” The painting defined Lempicka’s Art Deco style: a confronting gaze, self-assured and sexual. Lempicka’s portraits confronted the viewer with an unwavering gaze, self-assured, a dab of royalty or upper crust, as many of her clients were during the peak of her career. At that point in Lempicka’s career, she could choose who she wanted to paint and became one of the most sought-after portraitists.
Also in 1929, Lempicka traveled to New York, her first trip to the United States, with a commission to paint a portrait of Joan Price Jeffery (Portrait of Mrs. Rufus Bush), a young Socialite engaged to Rufus Bush. Bush commissioned her to come to New York and paint his financé as a wedding present for his bride-to-be. Upon her arrival, Lempicka was enamored with the strength of the New York skyline and towering skyscrapers. The skyscrapers frame the backdrop of the Portrait of Mrs. Rufus Bush. Though the marriage of the two socialites didn’t last, the portrait did.
Upon her return to Paris, Baron Raul Kuffner asked Lempicka to paint a portrait of his mistress. Lempicka painted the portrait and began an affair with Kuffner and his mistress. She married Kuffner in 1934, becoming “The Baroness with the brushes.”
A workaholic who reportedly painted for nine hours a day, stopping only for champagne and a bath, Lempicka was both an artist and a businesswoman who astutely combined traditional portraiture with advertising techniques, lighting, and an astute sense of placement and space on the canvas.
In 1931, in homage to her lifelong love and muse, Lempicka painted a portrait of Ira Perrot, holding a bouquet of calla lilies and wearing a sensuous formfitting evening gown of satin by Maison Blanche Lebouvier. The portrait was featured in the French fashion magazine L’Officiel. Perrot’s salacious red lips, slender, elegant fingers, and ruby red fingernails are all features found in Lempicka’s portraits of women.
With the onset of the war in the late 1930s, Lempicka convinced Kuffner to relocate to Hollywood. There, she hobnobbed among the beautiful people, painting their portraits until her style dwindled. Art Deco was no longer in vogue. Lempicka began painting spaces and religious themes inspired by her knowledge and study of Renaissance art. New York gallerist Julien Levy organized a traveling exhibition of Lempicka’s religious paintings in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Still, her work wasn’t well received, and her output as an artist diminished.
Lempicka and the Baron spent several years navigating between Paris, Los Angeles, and New York. In 1961, after an unsuccessful retrospective in Paris and New York, Lempicka decided not to exhibit again. The Baron died shortly after, and Lempicka continued her nomadic lifestyle.
In 1969, Lempicka returned to Paris, where she was contacted by the art dealers Alain Blondel and Yves Plantin. They asked to see Lempicka’s paintings from the 1920s and 1930s, which she had stored in the attic of her Paris apartment. In 1972, Blondel and Plantin organized a Tamara de Lempicka de 1925 to 1935 retrospective dedicated solely to the artist’s Art Deco period at the Galerie de Luxembourg. Lempicka attended, and there was a rekindling of interest in her extraordinary portraits.
In 1976, Lempicka donated some of her paintings to the French government. Other paintings were destined for the Musee National d’Art Moderne in Paris. A short time later, Lempicka returned to Cuernavaca, México, where she had acquired a large villa and where she died in 1980.
Tamara de Lempicka is best known as a portraitist. Other than a rare self-portrait, her portraits are rarely found in museum collections. Perhaps that is why the question is: who is Tamara de Lempicka? I’ve never heard of her.” Most of Lempicka’s portraits were acquired by private collectors. Madonna, an avid Lempicka collector, has five of her portraits.
Acknowledgment: I want to thank Charlie Goldberg, who is a font of art knowledge, for his extraordinary class on Tamara de Lempicka, as well as his generosity in sharing his vast collection of information on Lempicka’s fascinating life and her work.
IF YOU GO: Tamara de Lempicka’s first major retrospective organized in the United States is at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, California through February 9, 2025. https://www.famsf.org.