A new musical about the life of revolutionary artist Tamara de Lempicka, directed by Tony Winner Rachel Chavkin, plays on Broadway until September 8, 2024.
“From the Tony Award®-winning director of Hadestown and starring Eden Espinosa, this New York Times Critic’s Pick is a sweeping musical portrait of a woman who changed art and culture forever.
Spanning decades of political and personal turmoil and told through a thrilling, pop-infused score, Lempicka boldly explores the contradictions of a world in crisis, a woman ahead of her era, and an artist whose time has finally come.”
Tamara Łempicka is one of the most highly regarded artists of the Art Deco style, a classical, symmetrical form that peaked between 1925 and 1935. It was known as the “Arts Decoratifs,” and Łempicka was the most memorable artist representing that style.
Tamara Łempicka was born in Moscow in 1896 and died in Mexico in 1980. Her father, Borys Gurwik-Gorski was a wealthy Russian Jew, a merchant or an industrialist, while her mother, Malwina née Dekler, came from an affluent Polish family. Tamara and her siblings, Adrienne and Stańczyk, were raised by their mother and the Dekler grandparents in Warsaw. The Deklers were part of the cultural and social elite, friends of Ignacy Jan Paderewski and Artur Rubinstein, among others.
Her father disappeared from Tamara’s life when she was only a few years old, and the circumstances of his leaving remained the artist’s painful and profoundly hidden secret. She claimed her parents got divorced, but it is believed that Borys Gorski committed suicide. As an adult, Lempicka liked to emphasize that she was Polish. She probably even forged her birth certificate, claiming Warsaw instead of Moscow as her birthplace. Attempts to reconstruct her life and to interpret the artist’s pieces prove how deeply her biography was interwoven with her work. It is not just her paintings that let you quickly sense the atmosphere of the world in which the artist lived. The biography she liked to mythologize, too, shows the importance of self-aggrandizement in her artistic career.
She married a Polish count, Tadeusz Łempicki, with whom she fled to Paris following his arrest by the Bolsheviks.
She studied painting at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and Academie Ranson. Her first exhibition in Paris was in 1922 at the Salon d’Automne, which brought her immediate success. She changed her name to Tamara Łempicka.
She quickly rose to fame as the portraitist of Paris society’s crème de la crème. She soon developed into the most fashionable portrait painter of her generation among the haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy, painting duchesses, grand dukes, and socialites.
Her popularity soon translated into financial success. The aesthetics developed by Lempicka appealed to the tastes of the affluent bourgeoisie, and so did the topics taken up by the artist. She focused mainly on portraits and still life but mostly painted nudes. Nude portraits were designed to decorate the salons of the affluent bourgeois. Female aristocrats and the wives of wealthy industrialists ordered their portraits in large numbers, more often than not life-size. The number of these orders resulted in an almost mass production of paintings. At that time, Lempicka usually painted for over twelve hours daily. The art critics, however, frequently treated her works with reluctance. Different categories, from the aesthetic to ethical ones, were often mixed up in their opinions when they condemned the painter for “corporality verging on kitsch or sin at least.” They called her “the propagator of perverse painting,” emphasizing the homoerotic character of her nude paintings. This aspect of her painting won her popularity and interest among the mass public.
Her self-portrait Tamara in the Green Bugatti from 1929 can be seen as the symbolic image of an emancipated woman of the time. An article in La Pologne remarked that de Łempicka’s “models are modern women. They know neither hypocrisy nor shame of the bourgeois morality. They are tanned from the sun and wind, and their bodies are lithe as those of the Amazons”. The times during which Lempicka created her art were strongly marked by decadence. If one looks at her work and private life from that point of view, they seem to have all the hallmarks of that period. Her lifestyle was far removed from the commonly accepted social norms. Lempicka did not prudishly hide her many love affairs.
Her well-known acquaintance with Gabriel d’Annunzio provoked a terminal crisis that led to divorce in 1927.
Lempicka remarried in 1934 to Baron Roul Kuffner, owner of the most excellent landed estate in Austro-Hungary. She decided to leave Europe in the winter of 1938, most probably alarmed by the growing wave of Fascism in Europe. Because of Kuffner’s origin, they decided to close the estate and leave for the United States. In the 1940s, Lempicka became the favorite portrait painter of Hollywood stars and the social and financial elites. There, she also became famous for her rich and decadent social life.
After her husband died in 1962, Tamara Lempicka gave up painting and moved to Mexico, where she died in 1980. Her ashes have been scattered over the Popocatepetl volcano.
Tamara Łempicka, one of the most recognizable artists of the Art Deco, has admirers worldwide. Among them is the singer Madonna. She has lent her paintings to events and museums. Madonna has also featured Lempicka’s artwork in her music videos for Open Your Heart, Vogue, and Express Yourself. Other famous collectors include actor Jack Nicholson and singer-actress Barbra Streisand.
If you are planning to visit NYC, be sure to see the musical about Lempicka on Broadway. The Longacre Theatre is a Broadway theater at 220 West 48th Street in the Theater District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City.
“Lempicka”’s marquee at the Longacre Theatre (Credit: Kevin V. Doan)
