It is with great enthusiasm that I want to announce that a retrospective exhibition of paintings by Tamara de Lempicka, a Polish painter of the first half of the 20th century, who achieved incredible success in the interwar period in Paris and then in New York, is coming to Houston MFAH from the Young Museum. She also visited Houston for a while, and I met her granddaughter here many years ago. In September last year, a portrait of her daughter was sold at an auction in New York for $14.7 million. On March 5, a portrait of Dr. Boucard will be at Christie’s auction in London, for an estimate of $6-$10 million.
WHEN: March 9 to May 26, 2025
WHERE MFAH, 1001 Bissonnet, Houston, Texas 77005
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.
‘Każdy z Polonii powinien zobaczyć tę wystawę, to element naszej dumy narodowej. Lempicka przez całe jej życie przyznawała się do polskiego pochodzenia. Wyjechała z Warszawy do Paryża jako dwudziestoletnia kobieta.
Uwielbiamy jej obrazy. Wiele z jej obrazów odnosi się do świętych czczonych w wierze katolickiej. Kolekcjonerami jej sztuki są również Jack Nicolson, Madonna‘
Tamara Lempicka Mural Gallery was unveiled in December 2023 in Austin – organized by Polonia Organization DotDotConnect