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The de Young Museum in San Francisco is presenting a landmark American exhibition on Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka

Through February 9, 2025
de Young Museum
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
San Francisco, CA 94118
t: (888) 901-6645
www.famsf.org

Born in Poland, married in Russia and celebrated in Paris, Tamara de Lempicka and her works are widely known across the Atlantic Ocean, where she was then, and remains still today, an icon of Art Deco. But Lempicka’s reach extended to North America, including in 1939 when the artist, fleeing the outbreak of World War II, moved to the United States, where she would remain until her death in 1980.

Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980), Portrait of Ira P., 1931, oil on canvas. Private collection.

Although a large chapter of her career was spent in North America—in Beverly Hills, California; Houston, Texas; and Cuernavaca, Mexico—Lempicka has never received a museum retrospective in the United States. The de Young Museum is correcting that with Tamara de Lempicka now open in San Francisco.

“We are honored to present this country’s first major retrospective of Lempicka’s work,” writes Thomas P. Campbell, director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “It is especially fitting considering this city’s history as a great Art Deco capital—with landmarks of the period such as the Golden Gate Bridge and Coit Tower—which adds to our understanding not only of Lempicka’s work specifically but also of this influential art and design period at large.”

Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980), Portrait of a Man (Tadeusz Lempicki), 1929, oil on canvas. Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne / Centre de création industrielle, Paris. Gift of the artist, 1976, on deposit to the Musée des Années Trente, Boulogne-Billancourt, France.

The retrospective will feature 120 works by the artist, including major masterpieces, rarely seen drawings, experimental still lifes, domestic interiors and a selection of Art Deco objects, sculptures and dresses from the museum’s collection. The museum is also publishing a full catalog, which includes a preface from Barbra Streisand, who first discovered the artist’s work in Paris in 1979. “…[S]he created a style that was such an original take on Art Deco,” Streisand writes. “You would recognize it instantly, as I did when I walked into the Galerie du Luxembourg on that same trip and saw another painting of hers hanging on the wall. That seemed like serendipity, to come across her work again when I was shopping for antiques. It was her Portrait of Ira P., done in 1931. This woman was dressed in a white satin gown (with gray undertones), and she was holding a bouquet of calla lilies in her long, elegant hands, with red fingernails that matched her red lips and her red shawl. I had to have it, because I was designing an Art Deco screening room for my Beverly Hills house in shades of gray, red, and black…and she would look perfect there.”

Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980), Portrait of Mrs. Rufus Bush, 1929, oil on canvas. Private collection. Courtesy of Artis—Naples, The Baker Museum, Naples, Florida.

Streisand reveals she paid $67,000 for the work. Today it could go for many times that amount, which shows how her star has risen within the art world. Portrait of Ira P. will be in the show, as well as Portrait of a Man (Tadeusz Lempicki), a portrait of the artist’s ex-husband. She left the work famously unfinished after they separated. These works, and many others, exemplify her skill as a figurative painter whose works are instantly recognizable around the world, not just in Europe.

The exhibition will remain on view through February 9, 2025.