Tamara de Lempicka, Étude pour une jeune fille dessinant (study for Young Girl Drawing), 1932

Nicknamed the Baroness with the Brush, Lempicka was famed for her jazz-age style that fused the meticulousness of the Renaissance with the hard-edges of Art Deco. 

Her figures are often tightly cropped within the four corners of the frame, and I find they have a metallic quality to them — or perhaps a magic magnetism — drawing you in with their sharp gazes and angular cheekbones.

Born in Poland at the end of the 19th century, Lempicka was raised in Russia, but escaped at the outbreak of the revolution. From there, she settled in Paris, the center of the avant-garde, where she thrived. She painted celebrated characters in the highest fashions of the day and embraced sexual liberation.

She epitomized the modern woman and was apparently known to break for only “baths and champagne.” This was, of course, in her modernist apartment-slash-studio, designed by her equally successful sister, Adrienne Górska.

Here we meet her in 1932, through an intimate study of her daughter, Kizette. With a typical ’30s hairdo, Kizette clutches a sketchbook and looks out, slightly ominously, into the distance. She appears on the CUSP of adulthood; although her face is mature, her collar and polka-dot dress give away her youthful age. Lempicka was only in her teens when she had Kizette, and often told people they were sisters. Although their relationship was close, it came with complications.

Hailed for her exuberantly colored portraits, Lempicka is to my mind just as important a draftsperson as she is a painter. And it’s through this exquisite drawing, rendered in black chalk, that we see these skills executed in her distinctive Art Deco aesthetic.

It’s also historically important to note that this is the first work by Lempicka to have ever been actively purchased by a North American museum. All other works in museums were either given or bequeathed. The Legion of Honor is also the first museum in the US to stage a solo exhibition by Lempicka, in 2024.