First Major US Retrospective of Art Deco Icon Tamara de Lempicka Arrives at the MFAH in March 2025

With over 90 works on display, “Tamara de Lempicka” presents a new perspective on the artist, her life, and her work.

HOUSTON—December 18, 2024—With portraits that exude a cool elegance and enigmatic sensuality, Tamara de Lempicka (1894–1980) became one of the leading artists of the Art Deco era as she distilled the glamour and vitality of postwar Paris and the theatrical sheen of Hollywood celebrity. Conceived by Gioia Mori, preeminent scholar of Lempicka’s work, and Furio Rinaldi, curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, this retrospective exhibition—the first major museum survey devoted to the artist in the United States—explores Lempicka’s distinctive style and unconventional life through over 90 paintings and drawings, which range from her first post-Cubist compositions and her coming of age in 1920s Paris, to her most famous nudes and portraits of the 1930s, to the melancholic still lifes and interiors of the 1940s. Following its San Francisco premier in autumn 2024, Tamara de Lempicka will be on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from March 9 to May 26, 2025, the second and final venue of the exhibition. 

“Tamara de Lempicka took Paris by storm in the 1920s with paintings that united classicism and high modernism to create some of the most defining works of the Art Deco era,” commented Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams chair of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “Her brilliant portraits and figure studies quickly captured the popular imagination across Europe and the United States, but her career was eclipsed by World War II.  Now her work is once again rightly in the spotlight, after being alternately celebrated, ignored, and rediscovered for almost a century. We are enormously pleased to be able to present this thoughtful, considered appraisal, one that will help ensure a lasting appreciation of Lempicka’s singular vision.”

Tamara de Lempicka describes the arc of the artist’s career in the context of her times and against the backdrop of epochal world events. Born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz in Poland in an era of fierce anti-Semitism, she learned at an early age to conceal her Jewish ancestry. In 1916, she married a Polish aristocrat, Tadeusz Lempicki, and the two settled briefly in St. Petersburg before fleeing to Paris in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Faced with the need to earn money, Lempicka determined to become an artist: she first presented her paintings at the Salon d’Automne in 1922 under the name “Monsieur Łempitzky,” and then more forthrightly as “Tamara de Lempicka” as she swiftly moved to the forefront of Parisian café society. Over the following decade, Lempicka’s paintings brought her muses and lovers—including the poet Ira Perrot and the model Rafaëla—vividly to life, while her commissioned portraits captured the dazzling cosmopolitan mood of the era. 

Lempicka’s second marriage, to Austro-Hungarian Baron Raoul Kuffner-de Diószegh, granted her the title “Baroness Kuffner,” the name she took with her to the United States in 1939 in advance of the German invasion of Paris. After 1945 Lempicka divided her time between New York, Paris, and Houston where her daughter Kizette had settled. She spent her final years in Cuernavaca, Mexico. By the late 1940s her paintings had fallen out of step with the times, and as her studio practice ebbed, she exhibited infrequently throughout the 1950s and 1960s. However, Lempicka lived to witness a revival of interest in her work following the 1972 landmark exhibition Tamara de Lempicka de 1925 à 1939, mounted by the Galerie du Luxembourg in Paris. Barbra Streisand and Madonna, among other celebrities, acquired and helped popularize her iconic portraits in subsequent years. 

In Houston the installation will be complemented by photographs of the artist and selections from the MFAH’s permanent collection of modern design, as well as key additional loans from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, including drawings by Lempicka’s teacher and mentor André Lhote. “Acutely conscious of fashion and design, Tamara de Lempicka also had an inventive eye for detail,” states Alison de Lima Greene, coordinating curator for the exhibition at the MFAH. “Fiercely intelligent and unapologetically ambitious, she clearly understood the power of celebrity, and she took care to present herself after the style of Hollywood stars, staging portrait-photo sessions in her studio while clad in the latest couture. At the same time, her paintings are beautifully crafted, with an assured painterly touch impossible to see in reproduction.”

In addition to major contributions by Furio Rinaldi and Gioia Mori which bring to light hitherto unknown drawings and details of the artist’s biography, the lavishly illustrated catalogue features a preface by Barbra Streisand, a tribute from Françoise Gilot, and essays by Laura L. Camerlengo on “Fashioning the Modern Woman” and by Alison de Lima Greene on Lempicka in America. The exhibition has also benefitted from the archives and generous expertise of the artist’s family, which has graciously cooperated with this project.

Organization and Funding
This exhibition is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
In Houston, major support is provided by:
Bobbie Nau

Additional generous support is provided by:
Linnet F. Deily
Jay Jones and Terry Wayne Jones
Bettie Cartwright
Sara Dodd-Denton and Will Denton
Susanne and William E. Pritchard III
Leslie and Russ Robinson
Winnie Scheuer and Kevin Bonebrake
Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation
Collectors Studio

About the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 
Spanning 14 acres in the heart of Houston’s Museum District, the main campus comprises the Audrey Jones Beck Building, the Caroline Wiess Law Building, the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden and the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building. Nearby, two house museums—Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, and Rienzi—present collections of American and European decorative arts. The MFAH is also home to the Glassell School of Art, with its Core Residency Program and Junior and Studio schools; and the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA), a leading research institute for 20th-century Latin American and Latino art as well as the Michelin-starred restaurant Le Jardinier at the MFAH. www.mfah.org

Media Contact
Melanie Fahey, Senior Publicist, MFAH 
mfahey@mfah.org  | 713.398.1136