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 dra.
