Tamara de Lempicka
By Laura Heyrman
Currently the subject of a large retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, Tamara de Lempicka (Polish, 1894-1980) was an international sensation in the 1920s and 1930s. The artist is known for her smoothly painted images of elegant and fashionable people, as well as her highly stylized nudes.
“Among a hundred canvases, mine were always recognizable. The galleries tended to show my pictures in the best rooms, because they attracted people. My work was clear and finished … Create a new style, with luminous and brilliant colors, rediscover the elegance of my models.” – Tamara de Lempicka
Tamara de Lempicka (pronounced taMAra de wemPEEtska) was born in Warsaw to a wealthy family. She married a prominent lawyer in 1915 and settled in St. Petersburg until 1918 when they had to flee the Russian Revolution due to the husband’s association with the Tsarist government. The couple relocated to Paris and the following year, their daughter, Kizette, was born. She would become one of her mother’s favorite models between 1923 and 1933.
Around this time, Lempicka made the decision to become an artist, apparently with the goal of supporting her family, as her husband was unable or unwilling to find employment. (They would divorce in 1928.) Lempicka studied with two prominent artists in Paris: Maurice Denis (French, 1870-1943) from whom she learned traditional painting technique and compositional design and André Lhote (French, 1885-1962), from whom the young artist picked up a tendency toward Cubist backgrounds and precisely graduated color.
Lempicka made rapid progress and was soon selling works and showing in major exhibitions in Paris. Her early works, like The Fortune-Teller (1922), are expressionist in style, with painterly form and bold colors. These early works convey far greater psychological or emotional meaning than the artist’s mature works. During this period, the artist signed her works "Lempitzky," the masculine version of her surname, perhaps in an effort to counteract the rampant sexism of the early 20th century art world.
In 1925, Lempicka’s work was included in the “Exposition Internationale des Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes” (International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts) in Paris. The term “Art Deco” was coined from the French name of this event and in the century since, the artist’s work has often been seen as epitomizing that style. American fashion journalists reported on Lempicka’s paintings and her international profile grew. The same year, she had her first one-woman show in Milan. To prepare for the occasion, the artist painted 28 new works in 6 months. This committed hard work contrasts with Lempicka’s reputed association with high society and scandalous love affairs with both men and women. Her reputation wasn’t undeserved, but the artist was also deeply committed to her artistic success.
"There are no miracles, there is only what you make." – Tamara de Lempicka
As a girl, Lempicka had been taken by her grandmother on a tour of Italy where she had discovered the greats of Italian art, especially of the Renaissance. Among her surviving works are copies of works by Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Bernini, but the artists who had the greatest influence were the 16th century Mannerists and the Neoclassicist J.A.D. Ingres. From these inspirations, Lempicka took the practice of distorting anatomy to achieve complex, elegant lines. This is most visible in the artist’s nudes, like The Two Girlfriends (1930) in which the figure to the right has an unnaturally curved spine, and other anatomical features are misaligned in both figures. However, as in Ingres’ painting Turkish Bath (1862-1863) (LINK), the distortions create compositional rhythms and are combined with slickly perfect surfaces.
Lempicka’s portraits have the same sleek finish and mannerist figures. Fabrics cling to bodies like a second skin and hair often appears as a cap of metallic curls. Her color palettes are deliberately limited, so that paintings have visual unity. Figures are pushed close to the picture plane so that they appear monumental and powerful no matter the size of the work. Facial expressions and gestures are theatrical and mysterious. The overall effect is sensual but detached and sometimes even forbidding.
The artist was in great demand for portrait commissions in Europe and the United States. She finally accepted an invitation to New York City in 1929. Though she completed several portraits and experienced considerable success, the money she earned disappeared in a bank failure, and many of her potential patrons in the US and Europe where ruined by the Great Depression. The economic depression of the 1930s was matched by the artist’s emotional state and her usually large output declined. She began to incorporate Christian themes and more humble subjects into her oeuvre.
In 1934, she married her long-time lover, Baron Raoul Kuffner, after which she was known in the press as “The Baroness with a Brush.” Lempicka and her husband escaped World War Two by relocating to the United States in 1939, settling first in Los Angeles where her works were popular with the Hollywood movie community. With the intensifying of the war, Lempicka moved to Connecticut where she had purchased a house in the country. (Studio in the Country, 1941) Most works from this period were still lifes, in which she worked toward increasingly illusionistic form. (Bowl of Grapes, 1949)
In the post-war period, with the growth of abstract and non-representational styles, Lempicka’s stylized Art Deco approach looked old-fashioned and, though she had some exhibitions, her works didn’t sell. In the 1950s, she and her husband traveled extensively in Europe and the artist began to experiment with hard edged abstraction. These works demonstrate Lempicka’s ability to create color harmonies and the complex compositions remind the viewer that she was taught by one of the leaders of early 20th century Cubism, but they didn’t attract sales. The artist also made copies of some of her best-known earlier works but the new versions lacked the taut designs and refined surfaces of the originals.
Still at a loss over how to recover her former success, in the early 1960s, Lempicka experimented with thickly painted surfaces in still lifes and figure studies, often working with a palette knife. (Flower Bouquet II, 1961) Exhibitions of these works in Paris and New York were unsuccessful, however, and the artist increasingly withdrew from exhibiting. In 1961, her husband died and in 1963, Lempicka moved to Houston to live with her daughter’s family, essentially retiring from her public career as a painter. Lempicka moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1974 where she lived until her death in 1980.
Interest in Art Deco and Lempicka’s art has recurred periodically in the century since the artist made her first splash. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Art Deco became fashionable again. Lempicka’s paintings were the subject of a Paris retrospective in 1972, attracting prominent collectors, including actor Jack Nicholson and singer/actress Barbra Streisand. Then in the 1980s, the artist’s paintings drew the attention of another prominent collector, the singer Madonna, whose music videos “Open Your Heart” (1986) (LINK) and “Vogue” (1990) (LINK) include Lempicka’s works and stylistic inspiration. Another example of the artist’s influence appeared just a couple of years ago, in Giorgio Armani’s Fall/Winter 2022-2023 fashion collection. (LINK)
The exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston continues through May 26, 2025. mfah.org/exhibitions/tamara-de-lempicka
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