BRUSH WITH A BARONESS

THE ARTIST TAMARA DE LEMPICKA (1894–1980) painted her signature works nearly a century ago. Yet her art, at once overexposed and under-examined, appears suddenly ripe for reappraisal. “Tamara who?” queried a friend, an otherwise sophisticated consumer of culture, after asking what I’d been working on. She’d undoubtedly seen reproductions of Lempicka’s art over the years: the hard-edged, luminous nudes that Madonna used in two music videos; or the Self-portrait in Green Bugatti, a glamorous paean to the speed and autonomy of the New Woman driver, painted in 1927 for the cover of a German women’s magazine and popular for decades as a poster. 

Earlier this year, Lempicka, a Broadway musical that sought to scale the operatic heights of the artist’s tumultuous life—the Russian Revolution! Bisexuality in 1920s Paris! Futurism! Fascism!—received three Tony nominations before closing in May. But art world gatekeepers have long considered Lempicka, if they considered her at all, a mere historical curiosity. 

A single 1939 canvas at New York’s Metropolitain Museum of Art and four paintings from the ’40s to the ’60s at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, were until recently the sole works by this iconic Art Deco artist in US museums. All were gifts of the artist’s daughter, Kizette de Lempicka-Foxhall. 

“This lack of institutional interest really made us wonder why she hadn’t been perceived as a serious artist,” says Furio Rinaldi, curator of drawing and prints at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, who spear-headed his museum’s acquisition, in 2022, of the artist’s delicate, 1937 portrait drawing of her daughter. Rinaldi has teamed up with Gioia Mori, a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, to organize “Tamara de Lempicka,” the artist’s first major US retrospective, opening at the de Young in San Francisco on October 12. 

“HISTORY IS A BITCH, but so am I.” Thus proclaims an elderly, eccentric Tamara (Eden Espinosa, in a bravura performance) in Lempicka (2018), which features lyrics by Carson Kreitzer, music by Matt Gould, and book by both. The real-life artist tended to gloss over aspects of her biography, but we know that she was born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz-Gorska in Warsaw in 1894, the middle child of three in a wealthy Polish family of Jewish descent that later moved to Moscow. The musical opens with the octagenarian seated on a public bench in sunny 1970s Los Angeles, wrapped in furs and reminiscing about a long-ago love triangle. Then the furs fly off, the curtain behind her flies open, and in the first of many quick-change operations, she’s a young girl wearing a white wedding dress in 1916 Petrograd, improbably poised at an easel with paintbrush in hand and  about to marry the handsome Polish count Tadeusz Lempicki (Andrew Samonsky)—a catch! 

History never stops churning throughout the two-and-a-half-hour production, as the couple’s wedding amid Imperial Russian splendor gives way within minutes to the stomping troops and waving flags of the 1918 Bolshevik revolution, into whose dungeons Tadeusz is thrown as a counterrevolutionary spy. 

Tamara barters her body to win his release—never the best way to begin young married life—and eventually she, Tadeusz, and their little daughter, Kizette (Zoe Glick), wash up in Paris, along with masses of dispossessed White Russians. Tadeusz remains dazed by the loss of his ancestral forests, while Tamara begins to hunger for the freedom she senses among the artistic and libertine ferment of the French capital’s bohemian fringe. She’s also (at first) literally hungry. In one scene, she can’t resist gobbling up the pastries in a still life that she is painting. But her skills and reputation grow, and the commissions begin to pour in. 

Her paintings, considered on their own, conjure a lost world, more vivid than any Broadway stage set. She painted expat Russians, like the Grand Duke Gavriil Constantinovich, strapped by gold braid into his red uniform, the eyes in his bloodless face focussed on a distant, imperial past; or like her female friend and sometime lover, the smooth-limbed, red-haired Ira Perrot, wearing a gown of oyster-colored satin and holding a bunch of arum lilies. She painted Jazz Age characters, like the lesbian nightclub owner Suzy Solidor, her pneumatic breasts, blonde helmet of hair, and ruby lips a constant provocation. 

Lempicka’s paintings, considered on their own, conjure a lost world, more vivid than any Broadway stage set.

She painted her depressed and soon-to-be-ex-husband, a brooding, Slavic Heathcliff in a dark, double-breasted coat, with a white silk scarf elegantly knotted at his neck and his broad, sharp shoulders silhouetted against the gray towers of a modern metropolis.   

And she painted nudes–—Adam and Eve before the Fall; a glowing Andromeda, kinkily chained and yearning; her lover, “la belle Rafaêla,” in a pre- or post-coïtal nap. It has been said that she painted more female nudes than any woman artist had ever done before her. 

The musical Lempicka centers on the love triangle—banal but for its queer frisson—of Tamara, caught between her attachment to Tadeusz and her passion for “Rafaëla” (a composite figure, played touchingly by Amber Iman).The real-life Lempicka said she spotted Rafaëla, a beautiful streetwalker, plying her trade in the Bois de Boulogne and convinced her to come back to the atelier and pose—and do other things. My guess is that for the painter, a libertine endowed with an artist’s ruthless self-regard, the play’s imagined conflict between true love on the margins of society and the social cachet of heterosexual marriage to an aristocrat would have left her cold.  

The musical also posits Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (a manic George Abud) as Tamara’s artistic mentor. In fact, Lempicka did meet the author of the Futurist Manifesto one evening in a Left Bank café, where he was exhorting art students to “burn down the Louvre.” But she was, at heart, a classicist and a lover of Botticelli, even if she also found inspiration in the fizz of champagne or in the nighttime goings-on—a jumble of sailors and top-hatted gentlemen—in shacks along the Seine. 

She studied, for a time, in the atelier of the Symbolist Maurice Denis, but the only teacher whose influence she would later acknowledge was André Lhote. Decidedly less incendiary than Marinetti, Lhote preached a “return to order” in art, which would marry the discoveries of Cubism with French Neoclassicism. 

Marinetti’s central presence in the musical does allow us to raise the question of Lempicka’s politics. It can be challenging to get a grip on them. Marinetti, an enthusiastic backer of Mussolini, wholeheartedly embraced Italian Fascism (his enthusiasm the occasion for more stomping boots and waving flags in Lempicka). In her works from the ’20s and ’30s, Lempicka’s smooth bodies of seemingly air-brushed perfection recall a Fascist aesthetic (visible also in the 1937 architecture of Paris’s Palais de Chaillot), and while navigating a path through the choppy waters of European politics in that era, she befriended at least one leading Italian Blackshirt. But one senses that her primary allegiance was to her own survival. And at the height of her career, women—startlingly sensual and newly empowered—occupied the center of her artistic universe. 

During her years of separation from Tadeusz (beginning as early as 1928, with their divorce finalized in 1931), Lempicka took up with one of her collectors, the immensely wealthy Hungarian Jewish baron Raoul Kuffner, aka “Rollie.” They married in 1934, and left Paris for New York five years later, on the eve of the German occupation. 

They settled for a time in Manhattan and in Beverly Hills, where Lempicka, now known as “the Baroness with a brush,” tested the waters of an American career that never truly materialized. Her style changed. Gallerists lost interest, and she lost the glamour-girl, Greta Garbo­–esque looks she had cultivated for decades in public­-ity photographs for her art–—canny vehicles of self-promotion that male artists from Dalí to Warhol and Koons have also indulged in, without necessarily paying the highest price in terms of their critical reception.

In 1961, Rollie died. Roughly a decade later,  Lempicka was a largely forgotten figure in the art world, moving between Paris and Cuernavaca, Mexico (where she would spend her final years), when a young art historian, Alain Blondel, rang her doorbell in Montparnasse. Three years later, he and his partners in the newly established Galerie du Luxembourg, Paris, organized the first show of her signature works in decades. 

NOW, A NEW ERA of serious critical appreciation of Lempicka’s art  may be dawning. In 2022, the influential French curator Camille Morineau highlighted her work in “Pioneers,” an exhibition at the Muséee du Luxem­bourg exploring the sapphic modernist zeitgeist of 1920s Paris and positioning the artist alongside Romaine Brooks and others in the circle of writer Natalie Barney. And, curator Alison Gingeras says she will include Lempicka’s work in “the first comprehensive feminist art historical show in Poland,” which she is currently organizing for Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art, placing “this legendary Pole” “in a conversation about the female gaze and desire.” The artist was no Bohemian. “She was very attentive to high society,” explains Mori, the Lempicka expert. “When she traveled, it was always with major jewels and an important dress.” She was friendly with Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, and other couturiers who, it seems, were happy to lend to her. Yet these glittering trappings were no mere frivolity. The shattered illusions of stability—upended by science, war, and revolution—lay in heaps around Lempicka and her portrait subjects, who turned to high style as a resource, a temporary consolation, a ballast amid history’s whirlpool.   

“And yet,” Mori adds, “she was also a very free woman.” A whiff of her freedom may soon be felt, wafting from San Francisco to Warsaw and points beyond.  

Leslie Camhi is an essayist and literary translator, writing for the New Yorker, the New York Times, and other publications. Her first translation, of Violaine Huisman’s The Book of Mother, was long-listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize.