First exhibition devoted to Art Deco painter Tamara Łempicka opens in Poland

Poland’s first ever exhibition devoted solely to famed painter Tamara Łempicka – known for her Art Deco portraits, one of which in 2020 became the most expensive work by a Polish artist ever sold – has opened in the city of Lublin.

The Warsaw-born artist, also known as Tamara de Lempicka, lived in Paris and the United States, where she became prominent in high society circles, before spending the final few years of her life in Mexico.

The exhibition, titled “A Woman in Travel”, pays homage to her remarkable life and showcases many of her works, which are today prized by collectors, most famously Madonna.

The exhibition opened in the National Museum in Lublin on 18 March, the anniversary of Łempicka’s death in 1980. Organised jointly with Villa la Fleur in collaboration with the Tamara de Lempicka estate, it will run until 14 August 2022.

“Tamara Łempicka became an icon of her times. In the 1920s and ‘30s she created her own artistic language that is still recognisable today, bringing her fame and renown throughout the world,” write the organisers of the new exhibition.

Born in 1898 in Warsaw, then part of Congress Poland in the Russian Empire, as Tamara Rosalia Gurwik-Górska, she later went as a teenager to live with her aunt in Saint Petersburg. There she married a Polish lawyer, travelling with him to Paris, where she would spend the entire inter-war period.

After studying painting, Łempicka participated prominently in Parisian artistic and social life of Paris. Her second husband was Baron Raoul Kuffner, a wealthy art collector, and she thus became known as “the Baroness with a Brush”.

The couple moved to the United States when the war broke out, and there she painted celebrity portraits, still lifes and abstract paintings.

Her work regained renown in the late 1960s amid a resurgence of interest in Art Deco. After her death in 1980, her legacy continued with a number of tributes including a popular stage play and a novel about her life.

Madonna is a well-known admirer and collector of Łempicka’s work, which has featured in the singer’s videos and tour scenery. “I have a ton of her paintings in New York,” Madonna once told Vanity Fair. “I have a Lempicka museum.”

Jack Nicholson and Barbra Streisand are other famous collectors. In 2020, Łempicka’s Portrait de Marjorie Ferry went for £16.3 million pounds at auction in London, setting the record for a work by a Polish artist.

The new exhibition in Lublin is the first devoted to Łempicka’s works to take place in Poland. It follows other presentations of her paintings in recent years at the Seoul Arts Center and Chiablese Palace in Turin, as well as earlier exhibitions throughout Europe, the United States and Asia.

Paintings from public and private Polish collections as well as museums in France including the Pompidou Centre feature in the exhibit. The works of art, which are inextricably linked to the artist’s life, are presented alongside furniture, handicraft and clothes from the era.

“Although she happened to live in tempestuous times of political and socio-cultural changes, her unstinting determination and need to achieve success contributed to creating her own legend,” says the organisers.

“Tamara Łempicka created the figure of a timeless artist, and her skilful manipulation of facts from her life combined with elegance and innate grace meant that she was able to captivate anyone who appeared on her path.”

Main image credit: Jakub Orzechowski/Agencja Wyborcza.pl

Ben Koschalka

Ben Koschalka is a translator and senior editor at Notes from Poland. Originally from Britain, he has lived in Kraków since 2005.