Style & Luminosity: Tamara de Lempicka at the MFAH

Chris Becker·
HoustonVisual Art
·

Climb the stairs to the second level of the Law Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and you encounter two silent, black-and-white films, projected on the wall near the entrance to Tamara de Lempicka, the first major museum retrospective of the Art Deco pioneer and one of the 20th century’s most underappreciated artists. Three-and-a-half minutes of looping footage to the left captures Lempicka, her lover and muse Ira Perrot, and an unidentified fop smoking, drinking, and looking fabulous in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Always hyper-conscious of her appearance, Lempicka repeatedly gazes directly into the camera. On the right, a 1932 newsreel shows Suzy Solidor, the lithe and beautiful proprietor of a famous lesbian nightclub, posing nude for Lempicka at her easel.

“She and Lempicka were lovers for a while, and friends longer,” says Alison de Lima Greene, coordinating curator for the exhibition at MFAH. “Lempicka had a very what we would call now ‘masculinist’ approach to having multiple lovers and balancing them all.”

Born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz on June 28, 1894, in either Warsaw, Saint Petersburg, or Moscow, the trajectory of Lempicka’s biography is complicated and until her death in 1980, filled with gaps. Glamorous, wealthy, and free-spirited in her pursuit of sensual pleasure, Lempicka may initially come across as shallow—more of an “illustrator” than a “serious” artist. But the quality of works on view in the MFAH exhibition, on view through May 26, 2025, makes it clear that Lempicka is worthy of such an in-depth reappraisal of her art.

Tamara de Lempicka premiered at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the MFAH is its second and final stop. Originally conceived by Lempicka scholar Gioia Mori and FAMSF curator Furio Rinaldi, the exhibit includes over 90 paintings, sketches, and studies, including drawings by Lempicka’s teacher and mentor André Lhote, and several dramatic, cinematically staged photographs of Lempicka.

“Lempicka had an amazing sense of how to publicize herself,” says Greene. “Which I think is why so many people in film and music, like Madonna, Barbra Streisand, Tim Rice, and Elton John, respond to her so strongly.” Indeed, the show’s catalogue begins with a preface by Streisand, who first encountered Lempicka’s Portrait of Ira P. in 1979 and purchased it for a relatively paltry sum of $67,000. “To find a woman artist whose work I responded to so completely was very meaningful for me,” writes Streisand, who until recently was unaware that Lempicka was of Jewish descent.

In 1918, the Russian Revolution and the arrest of her first husband, Tadeusz Lempicki, forced Tamara and her young daughter, Marie-Christine, nicknamed Kizette, to flee their home in Saint Petersburg. They made it to Paris, where Tamara was somehow able to secure Tadeusz’s release. To survive, she sold some of her jewelry, and later, began painting commissioned portraits of the city’s “minor aristocrats and wealthy patrons,” as well as bohemian women. “Tamara may have loved women for their bodies and men for their power,” says Greene. “Most of her male lovers were to her financial or social or professional advantage. But that’s nothing new.”

Unique to the Houston exhibit is the integration of objects from the MFAH’s permanent collection of modern design, including perfume bottles, glass vases, and even a small waste basket, each carefully placed to engage and complement the art, and create a cool, elegant vibe for visitors. “If you put a pink vase in a room with nudes, it makes that vase very sexy,” says Greene.

And yes, Lempicka’s portraits and nudes, painted in Paris in between World Wars, are sexy but also beautifully crafted. “Lempicka was very savvy about how to paint in order for things to reproduce well,” says Greene. “Even nowadays, when we have amazing digital quality, somehow it’s hard to believe how well these paintings are made until you are actually standing in front of them.”

Tamara’s collectors were by and large men who were drawn to the sensuality of her paintings of women, and women with women. One such work is La Belle Rafaëla, a painting Lempicka redid many times of a shapely, full-figured woman touching herself purely for her own erotic pleasure. “The squishy parts of the female body . . . that if you lean this way, something else falls that way, I think that’s something she’s very attuned and sympathetic to,” says Greene. “It’s not just about how a woman’s body looks, but how it feels.”

Bookending the Paris-era paintings are Lempicka’s post-Cubist experiments from the 1920s, when she was a gifted artist, but unsure what she wanted to paint, and a selection of interiors and still lifes from the 1940s, where open books, vessels, fabrics, and fruit are strategically rendered like clues in a locked-room mystery. These somber, later works, glow with a luminosity, and élan vital history will forever associate with Lempicka and her art.

—CHRIS BECKER

Chris Becker

Chris Becker is a Houston-based composer and writer, and author of the critically acclaimed book, Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz. Learn more about Becker at beckeresque.substack.com. Photo by Mark Chen.