The San Francisco institution reveals personal details about the artist famed for her female portraits

The first major US survey of the enigmatic Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka (1894-1980) opens at the de Young Museum in San Francisco this month, with more than 120 works -- and newly uncovered biographical details.

The impetus for the exhibition was the museum's acquisition of a 1937 portrait drawing of the artist's daughter, Kizette, at auction three years ago. It was the first Lempicka work to be acquired by a US museum and will be on public view for the first time as part of the show. The exhibition has been co-curated by the Lempicka scholar Gioia Mori and the museum's Furio Rinaldi, who was instrumental in acquiring the work. "The drawing is a beautiful reflection of Lempicka's craftsmanship and a perfect addition to our holdings," Rinaldi says.

San Francisco, with its Art Deco landmark buildings and large LGBTQ+ community, seems the perfect city to host the artist's big show. Lempicka, after all, was known not just for her stylised portraits that blend Classicism and Modernism, but also for painting affectionate nudes of her female lovers from a uniquely female perspective. And at the de Young show, there will be an entire section dedicated to the artist's longstanding relationship with her muse and paramour Ira Perrot.

Who's the real Tamara?

The exhibition will be divided into four chapters, representing the names and corresponding identities that Lempicka used in her lifetime: Tamara Rosa Hurwitz (recently discovered as her birth name, which she hid in an attempt to avoid the antisemitism of early 20th-century Eastern Europe), Monsieur Łempitzky (in Paris in the early 1920s, she signed her works as a man in order to be taken more seriously), Tamara de Lempicka (she added the "de" in front of her Polish married name to denote aristocratic status), and Baroness Kuffner (Lempicka's moniker after she married her second husband in 1934, with whom she moved to the US in 1939).

Many of the exhibition's works are on loan from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, including Young Woman in Green (Young Woman with Gloves) (1930-31), "which captures the magic of Lempicka and portrays a new kind of woman emerging after World War I", Rinaldi says. Other highlights are Portrait of Mrs. Rufus Bush (1929), with its almost Futurist background of skyscrapers, and La Belle Rafaëla (1927), perhaps the artist's most well-known nude of one of her lovers, which Rinaldi describes as having "exquisite foreshortening. Lempicka captures a woman in the moment of self-absorption in a celebration of female sexuality".

In addition to Lempicka's famed 1920s paintings -- collected since the 1970s by celebrities like Madonna, Jack Nicholson and Barbra Streisand (who wrote the preface for the de Young exhibition's catalogue) -- the exhibition will feature the artist's early drawings and later works as well as Art Deco objects, sculptures and dresses to provide context. Lempicka was notorious for her fashionable clothing.

"We worked closely with Lempicka's granddaughter and great-granddaughter, who shared archival photos and papers with us," Rinaldi says. Piecing together some of these documents, researchers discovered Lempicka's birth name and year -- in her lifetime, the artist lied so much about her age that exactly when she was born remained unclear.

After its San Francisco run, the show will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where Lempicka's archives are housed. Lempicka lived in Houston for several years, before moving to Mexico in 1978. When Lempicka died three years later, per the artist's request, Kizette hired a helicopter and scattered her mother's ashes into a volcano. Even in death, Lempicka was all about extravagance.

* Tamara de Lempicka, de Young Museum, San Francisco, 12 October-9 February 2025