“Life on the Fringe”?
Tamara de Lempicka, Young Woman in Green (1927–30). Centre Pompidou, Paris, purchased 1932, inv. JP557P. © 2023 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY.
“Art Deco” is the term most commonly applied to the art of Tamara de Lempicka – a word which, in its ubiquity, hardly seems adequate to encompass the entire oeuvre of one artist. And yet, with plunging curves, soaring peaks, and a fuzzy but consistent clarity of line, the epithet still seems irreplaceable when faced with Lempicka’s vast body of work. Her paintings, among which portraits and nudes made mostly during the 1920s and ’30s remain hallmarks, express a smoky sensuality governed by forceful contours that both epitomize and refute everything you think you know about modernism. Indeed, the artist was as much a disciple of Renaissance Old Masters as she was a self-inserted pillar of the modernist avant-garde. These contradictions will doubtless be in full focus this October, when the de Young Museum of San Francisco opens the first major retrospective of Tamara de Lempicka’s work ever held in the United States.
The retrospective, curated by Furio Rinaldi alongside Gioia Mori, spans the hundreds of works thus far attributed to Lempicka, from sketches and preparatory drawings to the grand female nudes that have found homes in numerous Hollywood mansions. It is organized chronologically: this approach serves a need to parse through Lempicka’s baffling biography rather than a bland tendency to glamorize the dramatic modernist artist at the expense of their art. Rinaldi told Artnet that the approach of the show aims to “provide a more three-dimensional understanding of Lempicka,” and likely also to avoid a reductive and somewhat sanitized approach to an artist who defined the twentieth century as much as she was defined by it.
A successful and (it seems) largely self-taught and self-represented painter, romantically involved with men and women throughout her life, known by numerous names and monikers, the winding story of Tamara de Lempicka reads like a novel. Born in Warsaw (or Moscow?), Lempicka was raised in a wealthy bourgeois family and married a wealthy Jewish lawyer, with whom she fled to Paris following the Bolshevik Revolution. In personal studios in Paris, New York, and California, the artist drew and painted prolifically, including de Young’s recently acquired sketch of her daughter, Kizette, dated to 1932. Portraits both painted and drawn form one section of the retrospective, which takes Lempicka’s various monikers as a structural cue for grouping eras of her biography.
Tamara de Lempicka, Study for Jeune fille dessinant (1932). Graphite on Fabriano Paper, 32.5 cm x 23.2 cm. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, Lisa Sardegna and David Carrillo, Phoebe Cowles and Robert Girard, and Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts Endowment Fund, 2022.10. © 2023 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY.
Scholarship on this remarkable artist and her sensual, smoky art remains sparse, partly because Lempicka consistently built up a fabricated biography of anecdotes over her long life, and maintained such a dense network of autobiographical fiction that even facts as basic as her place of birth remain somewhat disputed. Lempicka and her husband Tadeusz were decidedly upper-class (both had to flee Bolshevik Russia separately after Tadeusz was imprisoned in 1918), and their discomfort with leftist theories reflected the isolated decadence which Tamara continued to pursue her entire life. In painting, Lempicka’s personal interpretation of cubist forms also reflects this disjunction, as she boldly combined academic Renaissance compositional elements with her personal take on the abstract dynamism of futurist forms like those of Kasimir Malevich. Indeed, Lempicka’s representational “art deco” style carries an imposition of structure and polished, consumable naturalism onto a modernism that clearly interested her, if more as an exotic novelty than a core dogma.
This outsider perspective on the modernist canon was central to Lempicka’s own formation of her notoriously unreliable autobiograpical narrative. She is famously quoted as claiming “I live life in the margins of society, and the rules of normal society don’t apply to those who live on the fringe.”
Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980), La Musicienne, 1929. Oil on canvas. 45⅝ x 28¾ in (115.8 x 73 cm). Sold for $9,087,500 on 11 November 2018 at Christie’s in New York. Artwork: © Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2020.
Such a claim can only fuel the fires of an already sultry life story, but it also sheds clear light on how Lempicka viewed her own artistic output. A self-proclaimed margin dweller, the young Muscovite of impeccable social connections spent much of her life cultivating a very specific image of tasteful outlandishness that contrasted quite sharply with her privileged upbringing. How then does her explicit self-labeling affect how we view her art? Certainly, actively declaring herself an “outsider” can be seen as a strategic move both socially and artistically for Lempicka, to make her artworks more desirable as items of a non-legitimized subcultural effort. But it can also be seen as a strategy of genuine self-expression by an artist who continuously positioned herself at the margins of the avant-garde, and whose art reflects a fascination with both academic tradition and abstract modernism.
While it is tempting, and perhaps most advisable, to let Lempicka’s voice continue to dictate her distinctive body of work, there is also room to interrogate and challenge the artist’s claim over her own marginality: Is the “fringe” truly defined by whoever lays claim to it?
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