I live life in the margins of society, and the rules of normal society don’t apply to those who live on the fringe.
As the Art Deco siren, Tamara de Lempicka anticipated some of the key elements of Art Deco through her paintings.
Tamara really invented her own style. Nobody had ever seen anything quite like it.
My name is Furio Rinaldi. I’m the co-curator with Gioia Mori of a retrospective on Tamara de Lempicka at the de Young museum.
I’m Marisa de Lempicka. I’m Tamara de Lempicka’s great-granddaughter and manager of her estate. My sister, Cristina, and I first met Tamara when I was about five years old. We traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico, to visit her. She came out dressed in a long tunic with a matching huge hat. She loved hats. In this first trip, she invites me to spend the night in her room.
I remember getting in bed and smelling the very intense oil. She used oil paint. She had a little painting smock, and she had a light on her painting. As she’s painting, she’s telling me, “You know, Marisa, when we left Saint Petersburg, we had to flee. We lost our house. We lost many of our friends. We lost all of our possessions.
We arrived in Paris with nothing. I decided I was going to become the most important painter in Paris. And after every painting I would sell, I would buy myself a diamond bracelet. And I would paint day and night until I had diamond bracelets from here to here.” These bracelets were not only a way to show her success, but also if she ever needed to flee again, she could take these diamond bracelets with her and start again.
The origins of Tamara de Lempicka are riddled in mystery. We now know that she was born in 1894. Lempicka claimed to be born in Warsaw, Poland, but her family relocated to Saint Petersburg or Moscow, Russia.
Her grandmother, Klementyna Dekler, was very influential in Tamara’s life. Tamara’s mother allowed Tamara to go with Klementyna to Florence and Rome, and visit all the museums. And that is where Tamara really fell in love with art.
In Saint Petersburg, in 1916, Tamara will meet her husband, Tadeusz Łempicki.
Tadeusz was the most handsome man in all Saint Petersburg. So, what Tamara wanted, Tamara got.
The couple fell in love instantly.
They were married in 1916. Soon after, my grandmother Kizette was born. So they had pretty much their life all planned. He was going to be part of the Russian court working for the tsar as a lawyer. Pretty much from one day to the next, it changed.
1917 is kind of a watershed moment for the history of Russia, which will see the monarchy of the tsar being overthrown. Because of his aristocratic background, Tadeusz is incarcerated. Tamara and her daughter leave, ultimately arriving in Paris.
She was able to secure his release, and he eventually met her in Paris.
There are no miracles. There is only what you make. My goal is never to copy. Create a new style, clear, luminous colors, and feel the elegance of the models.
Once arrived in Paris, Lempicka starts joining some art academies in the quarter of Montparnasse. She joins the classes held at that time by the post-Cubist painter André Lhote, who was a very important painter at the time, but an even more important mentor and teacher. Because of her incredible talent, she quickly surpasses her teacher. She acquires an individual, independent style very quickly.
One of the closest people to her was her daughter, Kizette, my grandmother. She was an adorable, beautiful little girl.
It is thanks to Kizette that Tamara de Lempicka produces some of her most memorable early portraits. One of them is certainly Kizette at the Balcony.
I love this painting because it portrays Kizette kind of in a mischievous way, and she has kind of a little defiant look.
It is a very captivating painting. It is life size. Kizette is looking at us in kind of a melancholic way, but the posture of her body, kind of occupying the entire height of the canvas, makes it absolutely memorable and possibly one of Lempicka’s earliest masterpieces. No other family member or sitter appears as much in Lempicka’s paintings as Ira Perrot.
Ira Perrot is certainly one of the most fascinating of Lempicka’s muses, but most importantly, she was her longtime girlfriend. She is the subject of Portrait of Ira P., with the calla lilies, where Ira appears wrapped in a beautiful silk white dress, holding a giant bouquet of calla lilies. The only touch of color, other than white, is the beautiful red shawl, the red fingernails, and the red lips.
La belle Rafaëla is also a very significant work. It shows Rafaëla, who was one of Lempicka’s lovers. It shows her naked body lying down, and we see it from a certain, very specific perspective, from below. It is a point of view that mimics Lempicka’s. She is not looking at us. Unlike the many nudes from the Western art tradition that were done by male artists and for the male gaze, Rafaëla in this painting is self-absorbed in her own pleasure, kind of showing the unabashed power of female sexuality.
One of my favorite paintings is a portrait of her husband, Tadeusz, my great-grandfather.
His neck wrapped in a beautiful pearl-gray scarf, black trench coat, set against the usual background of skyscrapers.
I feel you can see his soul. He was a very handsome man, but you can also see his sadness.
As her career as an artist was surging and thriving, her marriage was slowly falling apart, as Tadeusz was very much of a conservative background.
He wanted Tamara to be the way she was when they married in Saint Petersburg, and life had changed.
Tadeusz did not really tolerate Lempicka’ss affairs with both men and women, her abuse of cocaine, and the habit that she has of listening to Wagner at full volume while she was painting. They divorce the same year of the execution of the portrait, and very meaningfully, if one looks closely, the left hand where the wedding band of Tadeusz should be is purposefully left unfinished.
Because of the Nazi invasion in Europe, together with her second husband, Lempicka leaves Paris and arrives in Beverly Hills in California.
So she really had to create a new persona again. She would nourish relationships with the media, with the newspapers. She wanted to portray herself to the world as a successful, independent woman. In California, Tamara starts exhibiting again, first in New York in an exhibition in 1939, followed by San Francisco, presenting 12 paintings. I’m thrilled for the exhibition at the de Young, we have gathered 8 of those 12 paintings.
I was the first woman to paint cleanly, and that was the basis of my success. From a hundred pictures, mine will always stand out.
The exhibition aims to introduce Tamara de Lempicka and her defining role in the evolution of the Art Deco to the American audiences. It is the first exhibition of this kind in the United States. It is an almost entire retrospective of her work.
We, the family, feel thrilled that Tamara’s work is still touching and speaking to so many people around the world. One of Tamara’s lasting legacies is that she is truly a self-made woman, a self-made artist. She would be an Instagram star today because she knew how to promote herself. She was a true original.