Where does a darling of the art deco movement go to retire? For Tamara de Lempicka, once a painter of the rich and famous, known for her evocative cubist-inspired style, it was Cuernavaca, Mexico—by way of Houston, Texas. Houston was where her daughter Kizette was based. And, although the two had a turbulent relationship, they had often served as each other’s muses—Kizette as her mother’s model for the award-winning painting Kizette on the Balcony, and Tamara as the embodiment of a strong work ethic. Their reunion in Houston was brief, and afterwards Tamara finally built her dream estate in Mexico, the home in which she died at eighty-six, with her daughter at her side.
Therefore, that the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) should be the next stop for the major retrospective exhibition of Lempicka’s work first mounted by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco represents a homecoming, of sorts. The exhibition showcases more than ninety works of art, dating from Lempicka’s early years on the Paris art scene to the time she spent painting in the United States after fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe in 1939. Lempicka’s work is emblematic of the art deco era. In her portraits, jagged, stylized women with sad, kohl-lined eyes don the fashions of the day. The MFAH will display Lempicka’s fashion-forward subjects alongside examples from its collections of art deco fashion. Such aesthetic contextualization almost feels superficial in comparison to how deeply Lempicka’s personal hardships were tied to her era: she was a refugee of the Bolshevik revolution, then later of the Nazi occupation. She was also a gay woman in Paris’s underground and a Depression-era mother who sold paintings to feed her daughter. She didn’t talk much about it, but she was also a Jewish woman, and harsh American anti-immigrationists criticized the depictions of refugees in her later work.
Lempicka is not really remembered for those works, even today. It is, instead, her fashionable and dynamic portrayals of society women that are so avidly collected by celebrities (Barbara Streisand and Elton John are among her fans). Such collectors, the MFAH says, are “attracted to the artist’s carefully groomed image.” Indeed, Lempicka excelled at showing what she wanted to show and hiding all the rest. She was born poor but worked upwards of twelve hours a day painting, until she became successful. She rose out of the grips of her persecutors, on the wings of the cherry-lipped angels she painted.
Later in life, struggling with depression, Lempicka transitioned to painting mostly still lifes. Then, she had a go at the non-representational art trend that was dominating the scene. The public weren’t ready to see her change styles, and she was mostly unsuccessful. The artist took refuge with her daughter in the city that now is helping to share her full story for the first time in the United States. Appropriately, it is a work in the exhibition from outside the mainstream of Lempicka’s oeuvre that best encapsulates her talent. Still Life of Fruit and Draped Silk, 1949, centers on a billowing textile that would be just as easily at home on the body of a society femme. The sculptural fruit reflects Lempicka’s cubist art education. A dynamic, peeling paper label on the edge of the table reads “LEMPICKA/ 1949.” The work demonstrates the artist’s truly tremendous, and overlooked, range.
When Lempicka died in 1980, the artist Françoise Gilot wrote her obituary for Vogue France. It was entitled “Tamara de Lempicka, Mysterious and Famous,”and in it Gilot states: “It doesn’t matter whether or not a body of work has been consecrated since it is often more up to the artists than the critics to recognize a genuine talent.” The obituary is reproduced for the first time in the catalogue of the exhibition and emphasizes the sensitive and reverent mode with which the FAMSF and MFAH have gone about surveying the career of this statement-making artist.
Tamara de Lempicka • Museum of Fine Arts, Houston • to May 26 • mfah.org
