Waldemar Januszczak’s tour of the Tamara de Lempicka show

    For an artist, being called “the Queen of Art Deco” is a heavy cross to bear. Poor Tamara de Lempicka. Art critics belittled her. Art historians mocked her. Museum directors ignored her.

    Her problem was that no one took art deco seriously: not on any intellectual level. Yes, it was the signature decorative style of the 1930s. Yes, the rich and the fashionable adored it and collected it. But if you were not rich and fashionable, you despised its affectations and mistrusted its paper-thin elegance. Like the output of Salvador Dalí, art deco was seen as an entry-level taste for neophytes and the nouveau riche.

    Given this stack of prejudice, it is cocky of the de Young Museum in San Francisco to lift a magnifying glass to Lempicka and to subject her to a thorough and rousing investigation. So surprised was I by the de Young’s vaunting ambition that I journeyed a quarter of the way round the world to sample the verdicts. Given what San Francisco has become — a city with fentanyl addicts passed out on every corner — my journey, too, felt brave.

    Lempicka was born in Warsaw in 1894. In any other century that would have made her Polish, but as Poland did not exist at the time, having been partitioned up by its loving neighbours Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary, she came from a liminal state that existed fiercely in the mind but not on the map: a nation without boundaries. And not having borders turned out to be her USP.

    I use the name Lempicka, but Tamara changed her designation as regularly as you and I change our mobile phones. The show presents us with several variations. Her birth name, it turns out, was Tamara Rosa Hurwitz, and she was Jewish. But that has only been discovered recently in the research for the de Young show. Until now her real name was believed to be Tamara Rozalia Gurwik-Gorska, a thoroughly Polish identity.

    In 1916 she married a Polish lawyer called Tadeusz Lempicki, and took his name. That made her Tamara Lempicka (in Polish, the L is crossed and pronounced like a W). When she fetched up in Paris she passed herself off as a man and signed her art T Lempitzki. Later, to aggrandise herself in the French manner, she added “de” to Lempicka. Finally she managed to marry a real nobleman and became Baroness Kuffner.

    The show uses these adventures in flexible nomenclature as a guiding device and its sections are split up according to relevant names. The Tamara Rose Hurwitz section deals with her early work, and so on.

    It’s smart exhibition-making but serves as well to emphasise the shifting nature of her identity. Add the fact that she was bisexual, that she lied about her age to make herself younger, the religious flexibility of being both Jewish and Catholic, the self-willed determination to make it in a man’s world, and we have before us not the Queen of Art Deco, but a pioneering prototype of the modern woman: free to change, free to shape herself, free to be what she wants to be — not what anyone else demands.

    It’s a story told on its macro level. In the micro details we see a short period of finding herself, followed by the confident and stirring adoption of the signature Lempicka style — elegant portraits of beautiful people; women with porcelain faces; men with Superman shoulders and extra small heads; the entire cast, shiny and metallic, as if it has been fashioned from the finest Bugatti steel by a stylish carrossier.

    It’s a look that reaches its apogee in the famous Young Woman in Green, mounted here in a decorative shrine to itself, the gorgeous emerald greens set off perfectly by a seal-grey background.

    Caught in a swirling dance move like a stop-frame from a music video, sheathed in a dress so clinging it hides nothing, the girlette in the painting bears an uncanny resemblance to the pop star Madonna in her conical breasts phase. We know that Madonna is a determined collector of Lempicka’s work. We may not, perhaps, have realised how much of her own shifting identity was borrowed from Lempicka’s.

    “Cubism lite” is how modernist naysayers have dismissed Lempicka’s grabby painting style. Where cubism’s inventors, Picasso and Braque, were searching for a revolutionary new understanding of pictorial form, Lempicka’s adaptation creates sexy metallic effects that look easy to clean. What emerges forcefully, however, what surprises, is how knowing it all is and how heavily Lempicka was indebted to the old masters.

    Upturned eyes borrowed from Rubens. Serpentine poses borrowed from Courbet. Shiny surfaces borrowed from Ingres. Under the cover of posh salon portraiture, a hungry intellect was exploring the fabulous cave systems of art.

    Some of her detours took her to weird places. Her daughter, Kizette, whom Lempicka would pass off as her sister, so embarrassed was she by the proof of motherhood, is sexualised awkwardly as a tennis-playing femme fatale, and then as Lolita at her first Communion. In the scarred Judeo-Christian imagination of Tamara de Lempicka, something was casting eerie shadows.

    A section devoted to the nude plunges us into an adventurous bisexual love life involving sex workers picked up in the Bois de Boulogne and a female cast trapped weirdly between the states of desire and worship. If they put on some clothes, Lempicka’s naked lovers could pose convincingly as saintly madonnas. But they don’t put on their clothes.

    In the final room, which I found fascinating but which others have described as a fall-off, she drops most of the art deco shininess of her famous years and involves herself in religious themes (a decapitated John the Baptist!) and emotional memories of her native Poland.

    Her peripatetic life took her from St Petersburg to Paris to Monte Carlo to Los Angeles and finally to Mexico, where she died in 1980. In her will — ever the diva — she instructed her ashes to be scattered on the volcano Popocatepetl.

    She followed the money but did it her way. As lives go, it’s an object lesson in cheating the odds.

    Tamara de Lempicka at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, to Feb 9; then at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Mar 9-May 26