Visited the Tamara de Lempika exhibition at the DeYoung museum in San Francisco this weekend.
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I was fascinated by her work when I was in art school and it was a delight to see so many of her pieces gathered together for the first time.
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She was criticized in her day for pandering to wealth and fashion, which is understandable. Such a fashionista! It’s lovely that she is now being more thoroughly recognized as an icon of her time.
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The coolly stylish simplified forms of her portraits, and sexually-charged themes throughout her work, distract from the fact that she was actually quite talented at drawing and design. She craved recognition and respect from critics and historians, however …and largely failed.
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She turned to religious themes and classical genres later in life, like painting bowls of fruit and Christian saints crying, yet her work remained glossy and conventional. She did a couple of high-realism paintings that showcased her technical skill as an oil painter, nonetheless, she was not recognized as a “serious” modernist by her peers.
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She faced a lot of constraints that were characteristic of her time: fleeing Russia as a pennyless refugee, surviving prejudice against Jews, living with an addiction to cocaine, flourishing as a female artist in a biased art world (for years she painted under a male alias), then flaunting her bisexuality and feminine power in a heteronormative patriarchal culture.
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Certainly, she was a fabulous success in terms of fame and wealth. The very pinnacle of Art Deco glamour, That she craved more validation from the critics and her Avant-Guarde peers seems a bit tragic, now.
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Her art was most compelling and innovative when she was fearless and shameless. It was cliche and pedestrian when she was afraid of religious persecution and exclusion from the history books. I take this as a reminder to celebrate my inner muse, not to seek external validation, and to avoid attachment to fashion’s fleeting embrace.
https://www.famsf.org/exhibitions/tamara-de-lempicka
