Tamara de Lempicka, “Young Girl in Green (Young Girl with Gloves)” (c. 1931), oil on board, 24 1/4 x 17 7/8 inches (61.5 x 45.5 cm); Centre Pompidou, Paris (© 2024 Tamara de Lempicka Property, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY
Digital picture © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Artwork Useful resource, NY)
SAN FRANCISCO —Tamara de Lempicka on the de Younger Museum is the primary main US retrospective of the Polish-born artist, who lived and labored in Russia, France, the US, and Mexico in among the most tumultuous many years of the twentieth century. Synthesizing inventive influences she encountered alongside the best way to create her personal signature type, Lempicka’s artwork is straight away recognizable: half Cubist, half Futurist, half Artwork Deco, all of it glamorous and bigger than life. Even her small canvases radiate monumentality. Her work and life alike appear made for the silver display, and each have impressed movie and stage productions. Peripatetic in her lifetime, Hollywood fits as Lempicka’s true house.
Whereas this exhibition is understandably massive — comprising some 120 works that embody work, drawings, sculpture, images, and trend — it started with a single drawing. In 2021, when Furio Rinaldi, who co-curated the present with Gioia Mori, was within the strategy of buying a drawing of Lempicka’s daughter for the High quality Arts Museums of San Francisco, he realized that no different American museum had ever bought something by the artist for its everlasting assortment (although some, like The Met, have had her work donated). Likewise, no US establishment had mounted a complete retrospective of her artwork. Rinaldi, raised in Italy, first encountered the artist’s work in a Rome exhibition within the mid Nineteen Nineties. He felt this was the suitable second for an American retrospective. No query, the timing is nice. An eponymous Broadway present devoted to the artist opened (and closed) in spring of this yr, and a brand new movie debuted within the fall. Lempicka — a twice-married, overtly bisexual girl artist who lived by two world wars and on two continents — boasts an undeniably compelling biography. However that’s the least of it.
Set up view of Tamara de Lempicka on the de Younger Museum, San Francisco (picture by Gary Sexton, courtesy the High quality Arts Museums of San Francisco)
As a painter, Lempicka’s approach is assured, coolly marrying artificial Cubism with Sixteenth-century Italian Mannerism and the sleek sensuality of Jean-Dominique Ingres. However the films additionally come inevitably to thoughts. 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 trendy and charismatic as Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo. It’s unsurprising, then, that Hollywood could be very a lot part of her story. Anjelica Huston performed her on stage and collects her work, as do Jack Nicholson and Madonna, who featured Lempicka’s paintings in a 1986 music video and illuminated onstage in her most up-to-date tour. Barbra Streisand even wrote {the catalogue} preface for the present present, explaining how she purchased her first Lempicka work in Paris in 1979 for $67,000, meant for an Artwork Deco screening room she was designing in Beverly Hills, as a result of “she would look perfect there.” If nothing else, it was spectacular market foresight, contemplating that in 2020 Lempicka’s “Portrait de Marjorie Ferry” (1932) went for $21.1 million at Christie’s.
Tamara de Lempicka, “Etude pour La ronde,’ d’après Parmigianino” (c. 1932), graphite on paper; Museo Soumaya.Fundación Carlos Slim Assortment, Mexico Metropolis (© 2024 Tamara de Lempicka Property, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY, courtesy Museo Soumaya.Fundación Carlos Slim Assortment, Mexico Metropolis)
Attraction to a sure sort of magnificence and elegance is one factor, however at the moment in our historical past, encountering Lempicka’s artwork in individual typically gave me uncomfortable pause. Whereas sure portraits spotlight her engagement with Italian artwork, akin to “Wisdom (La Sagesse)” (1940–41), which is beautiful if somewhat banal, her most recognizable type contains massive portraits of intense, square-shouldered males, and girls draped in planes of vivid colour. These imposing architectonic figures are sometimes located inside or alongside thrusting city cityscapes. Such canvases, like these 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 robust Ubermensch by way of Ayn Rand vibes. So robust that after I googled Lempicka together with Rand, what got here up was the previous’s portray of her husband as the duvet for Atlas Shrugged. Actually, the LLC run by Lempicka’s property trumpets the truth that they’ve licensed the artist’s work for “books by the renowned writer Ayn Rand.”
Which isn’t to say that Lempicka shared Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, political or in any other case, or dedicated the identical fronting for precise fascism as filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, however all the identical, Susan Sontag’s 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism” stored working in my thoughts as I handed from one discomfiting portrait to a different. Lempicka was possible no fascist — she was, actually, a refugee from Hitler, one with Jewish roots, although she and her mother and father have been baptized Christians — however the unshakable aesthetic connection to figures like Rand and Riefenstahl is unimaginable to miss.
Tamara de Lempicka, “Sainte Thérèse d’Avila” (1930), oil on panel; Museo Soumaya.Fundación Carlos Slim Assortment, Mexico Metropolis (© 2024 Tamara de Lempicka Property, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY, courtesy Museo Soumaya.Fundación Carlos Slim Assortment, Mexico Metropolis)
Nor does Lempicka gloss over her connection to Christianity, whether or not it’s the crying nun of “Mother Superior” (1935) or the top of John the Baptist, or a weirdly terrifying painted model of Bernini’s already over-the-top “Sainte Thérèse d’Avila” (1930), made by some means extra so, particularly floating in its shiny silver Artwork Deco body. (It’s price saying that lots of the frames within the present are artistic endeavors in themselves.) For all of the meant pathos of those spiritual items, they’re principally floor. Shiny and ornamental as Artwork Deco itself, and as shallow as a film display.
The place the work is strongest, most authentic, and genuinely thrilling, is within the gallery titled “The Sapphic World.” Lempicka was famously, even shamelessly bisexual, and the gaze she holds on her lovers and fashions is recent and fierce. Her finest nudes eschew the Vaseline sheen and dewy upturned eyes of so lots of her portraits of girls for voluptuous curves and breathtaking angles. “The Beautiful Rafaëla (La belle Rafaëla)” (1927) is a view of her reclining lover painted ravishingly from under, as if the artist have been on her knees. Right here is the fervor lacking from her ostensibly spiritual topics.
Tamara de Lempicka is a present effectively price seeing, with work that hinges greater than most on questions of private style. It’s somewhat like these huge, brightly coloured containers of sweet you discover in film theaters. There could be loads you don’t like, however once you discover one thing you do, you wish to devour it.
Tamara de Lempicka, “The Beautiful Rafaëla (La belle Rafaëla)” (1927), oil on canvas, 25 1/2 x 35 3/4 inches (64.77 x 90.805 cm); Assortment of Tim Rice (© 2024 Tamara de Lempicka Property, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY Banque d’Photos, ADAGP / Artwork Useful resource, NY Picture offered courtesy the High quality Arts Museums of San Francisco)
Set up view of Tamara de Lempicka on the de Younger Museum, San Francisco (picture by Randy Dodson, courtesy the High quality Arts Museums of San Francisco)
Tamara de Lempicka, “Woman with Dove” (1929–30), oil on panel, 13 13/16 x 10 1/2 inches (35.1 x 26.6 cm); Non-public assortment (courtesy Artis—Naples, The Baker Museum © 2024 Tamara de Lempicka Property, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY. Images by RoseBudz Productions)
Set up view of Tamara de Lempicka on the de Younger Museum, San Francisco (picture by Randy Dodson, courtesy the High quality Arts Museums of San Francisco)
Tamara de Lempicka, “Woman with Arms Crossed”(1939), oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm); Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork (© 2024 Tamara de Lempicka Property, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY Picture copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork. Picture supply: Artwork Useful resource, NY)
Set up view of Tamara de Lempicka on the de Younger Museum, San Francisco (picture by Randy Dodson, courtesy the High quality Arts Museums of San Francisco)
Tamara de Lempicka, “Wisdom (La Sagesse)” (1940–41), oil on panel, 33 1/16 x 26 3/8 x 4 1/2 inches (84 x 67 x 11.5 cm); Colección Pérez Simón, Mexico (© 2024 Tamara de Lempicka Property, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY © 2019 Christie’s Photos Restricted)
Set up view of Tamara de Lempicka on the de Younger Museum, San Francisco (picture by Randy Dodson, courtesy the High quality Arts Museums of San Francisco)
Tamara de Lempicka continues on the de Younger Museum (Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Backyard Drive, San Francisco, California) by February 9, 2025. The exhibition was c0-curated by Furio Rinaldi and Gioia Mori.
