Tamara de Lempicka March 9–May 26, 2025

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With works that exuded cool elegance and sensuality, Tamara de Lempicka helped to define Art Deco.

Capturing the glamour and vitality of 1920s postwar Paris and the cosmopolitan sheen of Hollywood celebrity, Tamara de Lempicka (1894-1980) infused her paintings with a brilliant sense of fashion, design, and the theatrical. The first American museum retrospective of her work, Tamara de Lempicka explores the artist’s distinctive style and unconventional life as she rose to the pinnacle of café society. The exhibition charts Lempicka’s complicated trajectory against the backdrop of the era. While she reveled in her avant-garde sensibilities and openly conducted affairs with both men and women, she simultaneously concealed her Jewish ancestry as she evaded persecution in her native Poland, escaped Russia following the Soviet revolution, and ultimately fled Europe in 1939.

Featuring more than 90 works of art, the exhibition traverses Lempicka’s career from her beginnings in Paris to the decade she spent in New York and Los Angeles in the 1940s. Highlighting the evolution of her artistic style in concert with these transitions, her classic portraits, sensual figure studies, and melancholic still lifes trace the influences she absorbed from Cubist aesthetics, fashion and design, and her deep appreciation for art of the Renaissance and the paintings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. This exhibition also offers the first in-depth study of Lempicka’s drawings and compositional studies, revealing the creative process behind her iconic paintings. In addition, the display is augmented by exceptional examples from the MFAH’s Art Deco collection of costumes and design, as well as signature photographs from the era.

Lempicka largely withdrew from the art world in the 1950s and ultimately made Houston her second home. Following several decades of obscurity, she enjoyed a revival of interest in her work, sparked by the 1972 landmark exhibition Tamara de Lempicka de 1925 à 1939, mounted by the Galerie du Luxembourg in Paris. In the years since, her paintings have been avidly collected by celebrities like Elton John, Madonna, and Barbra Streisand, all of whom were attracted to the artist’s carefully groomed image. Streisand has contributed an appreciation of Lempicka’s work to the Tamara de Lempicka exhibition catalogue.

► Publication
The illustrated exhibition catalogue is available through the MFA Shop (713.639.7360) and the Museum’s Hirsch Library (713.639.7325).

Tamara de Lempicka / March 9–May 26, 2025