Tamara de Lempicka
Reviewed by Nina Folkersma
The Burlington Magazine, August 2025, Vol. 167 | No. 1469
The richly illustrated catalogue of the recent Tamara de Lempicka retrospective, held at the De Young Museum in San Francisco and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is a bold and timely celebration of an artist who, though iconic in popular imagination, has long been in need of rigorous art historical reassessment. While the exhibition itself constitutes a long-overdue institutional recognition of De Lempicka’s contribution to twentieth-century modernism, the publication, edited by curators Furio Rinaldi and Gioia Mori, stands independently as a major scholarly resource. With its detailed essays, extensive catalogue entries, and high-quality reproductions, the volume offers a comprehensive study of the artist, illuminating both the development of her distinctive style and the shifting narratives of her identity.
Born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz in Poland on 28 June 1894—a newly revealed birth name and a recently confirmed birthdate that contradicts the artist’s lifelong habit of subtracting years—her biography is one of constant transformation. De Lempicka actively shaped her public image, and her career is marked by a deliberate and—at times necessary—embrace of multiple personae. As a Polish-Russian émigré of Jewish descent navigating the complexities of the interwar period, her adoption of a Christian identity was not only strategic but also a means of survival. This transformation is reflected in the Christian iconography and motifs that appear throughout her work: depictions of Madonnas, saints and nuns, as well as the 1928 portrait of her daughter Kizette in a white first communion dress – all subtly reinforcing the persona Lempicka crafted in response to both social pressures and personal imperatives.
Both the exhibition and the catalogue are structured around four biographical chapters, each corresponding to one of the artist’s adopted identities: Tamara Rosa Hurwitz (her birth name); “Monsieur Lempitzky,” a gender-bending pseudonym reflecting her playful and strategic navigation of gender roles during her early years in Paris; the now-canonical “Tamara de Lempicka” (derived from her first husband’s surname Lempicki); and “Baroness Kuffner,” adopted after her second marriage to Baron Kuffner and their emigration to the United States in 1939. This framework allows for a nuanced reading of the artist’s evolving self-representation, particularly as it intersected with her public visibility and market reception. Yet the catalogue is careful to avoid a reductive psychobiographical approach, instead positioning these identities as lenses through which to examine shifts in patronage, subjects, and thematic preoccupations.
De Lempicka’s most celebrated period remains 1920s Paris, where her cool, angular portraits and stylized sensuous nudes established her as a leading figure of the Art Deco movement. Her iconic 1929 self-portrait in a green Bugatti, a powerful representation of the modern, independent woman, encapsulated the essence of the Roaring Twenties and the burgeoning spirit of modernity. Her immaculate style, however, also attracted skepticism from bohemian and avant-garde circles, who dismissed her work as too polished, too fashionable—too perfect. After settling in the United States in 1939 and obtaining citizenship in 1945, De Lempicka became a prominent figure in Hollywood’s glamorous social scene, mingling with celebrities, socialites, and wealthy collectors. By the 1960s, as artistic trends shifted toward abstract expressionism and conceptual art, her representational style fell out of favor, leading her to gradually retreat from active participation in the art world. By the time of her death in 1980, De Lempicka was nearly forgotten by mainstream institutions.
The exhibition—the first major retrospective of De Lempicka’s work in the United States—and the accompanying catalogue bring together an extraordinary selection of her iconic portraits and nudes, alongside lesser-known works and early still lifes. The inclusion of nearly forty drawings, many of which are reproduced and contextualized here for the first time, significantly enhances our understanding of the artist’s technique and meticulous planning. A major strength of the catalogue lies in its elevation of De Lempicka’s draftsmanship, an aspect of her practice largely overlooked in earlier studies. Curator Furio Rinaldi’s essay is particularly valuable in this regard, as it highlights the enduring legacy of her training with André Lhote. This post-Cubist French painter instilled in her the centrality of drawing as both a technical discipline and a mode of intellectual engagement with the past. Lhote’s influence is visible in the sculptural solidity of De Lempicka’s figures, with their smooth, porcelain-like surfaces and abstract linearity: a synthesis of Renaissance and Baroque sensibilities and the sleek geometries of Cubism. This approach is exemplified in the included study for Young Girl Drawing (c. 1937, pl. 53), a recent acquisition by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the first De Lempicka work to enter a U.S. museum collection. The graphite drawing, a portrait of daughter Kizette as a teenager, reveals a delicacy and precision that belie the assertive glamour of her better-known oil portraits. It offers rare insight into her working methods—particularly her ability to balance compositional control with psychological intimacy.
Alongside the essays by curators Rinaldi and Gioia Mori, a leading authority on De Lempicka, are contributions by Alison de Lima Greene, curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Françoise Gilot (the latter a reprinted obituary from Vogue Paris, 1980), as well as a biographical timeline and several detailed entries that enrich the scholarly apparatus. And, in a gesture as curious as it is telling, Barbra Streisand, an early collector of De Lempicka’s work, offers a homage, recounting not only her appreciation for the artist but also the financial windfalls from reselling her works—a detail that feels as glamorous (and unapologetically American) as De Lempicka herself.
The publication excels in articulating the complexity of De Lempicka’s status as a pioneering woman artist. Her self-fashioned independence, her commanding representations of modern women, and her commitment to supporting women in art resonate powerfully today. This emancipating force extends beyond her portraits of women, who are characterised by an unprecendented confidence and assertive coolness. The male subjects in her work are likewise imbued with a sexual charge and feminity rarely seen in the genre. Their languid attitutes and overly elegant, affected poses echo visual conventions traditionally reserved for female portraiture, therby subverting expectations of gender representation. De Lempicka never concealed the extent to which the fluid interchangability of her signatures corresponded to her fluid sexual identity. Openly bisexual, she frequented Montmartre’s lesbian nightclubs and maintained a lifelong relationships with Ira Perrot–her neighbour, poet, lover, and subject of numerous paintings. Over the course of twenty years, Lempicka created a number of works—visions amoureuses—dedicated to Perrot and other female lovers, including Suzy Solidor and Rafaëla. As the curators rightly assert, De Lempicka—by being transgressive, provocative, and fiercly independent—embodies the very symbol of an open-ended modernity, one whose influence spans from the Art Deco period to our own era.
The catalogue Tamara de Lempicka is more than a tribute; it is a reappraisal. With its outstanding reproductions and insightful essays, it restores Tamara de Lempicka to her rightful place in 20th-century art history—not just as an icon of Art Deco, but as a master of her craft, a strategic image-maker, and a woman who wielded glamour as both subject and weapon.
Tamara de Lempicka
Edited by Gioia Mori and Furio Rinaldi, with Alison de Lima Greene and Laura L. Camerlengo, with a text by Françoise Gilot and a preface by Barbra Streisand. 256 pp, incl. 200 col + b&w ills. (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco i.a.w. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2025). ISBN 978-0-300-27850-7
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