Tamara de Limpecka Retrospective at the deYoung

The late artist Tamara de Limpecka (1894-1980) is having yet another moment. She was the bisexual Art Deco It Girl of 1920s Paris; the subject of an interactive play that ran for years in 1980s Toronto, Los Angeles, and New York; and was the title character in Lempicka, which opened and closed on Broadway this year. Simultaneously, the deYoung Museum in San Francisco is giving the painter her first American museum retrospective.

Just reading the Wikipedia entry on her, it's easy to see why her life has been such an object of fascination. She was born into an upper class Polish Jewish family who converted not to Catholicism but to the Calvinist Polish Reformed Church. After her parents' divorce, Tamara and her mother moved to moved to St. Petersburg in 1910 where Tamara met her first husband, Tadeusz Łempicki, a Polish Catholic lawyer. (Pictured is the 1923 painting, The Bohemian Woman.)

During the Russian Revolution, her husband was arrested by the secret police in the middle of the night, and "Tamara searched the prisons for him, and with the help of the Swedish consul, to whom she offered her favors, she secured his release." (Pictured is the 1925 Portrait of Marquis Guido Sommi Picenardi.)

They fled Russia, finally reuniting with Tamara's family in Paris in 1919 at the end of World War One. Tamara had always been interested in art and she studied seriously before embarking on a career as a portrait painter of the rich and famous over the next two decades. Since her husband refused to find work, this turned out to be a financial necessity. (Pictured is the 1925 Portrait of Prince Eristoff.)

She divorced Limpecka in 1928 and became a mistress to the Austro-Hungarian baron Raoul Kuffner, marrying him in 1933 after his wife died. (Pictured is the 1932 Portrait of Baron Raoul Kuffner.)

Meanwhile, Tamara was engaging in public, scandalous love affairs with women, and many of them appeared in her paintings. (Pictured is the 1927 La Bella Rafaela in Green.)

Her lifelong lover, Ira Perrot, was the model for an entire series of paintings. (Pictured is the 1931 Portrait of Ira P..)

In 1919, she gave birth to her only child, a daughter who she used as a model for a series of famous paintings while not identifying herself as the model's mother. (Pictured is the 1927 Kizette on the Balcony.)

In 1929 she visited New York on a commission to paint the wife of an American oil millionaire, Rufus Bush. Alert to the oncoming disaster of the Nazis, she had her husband sell his properties in Hungary during the 1930s and they eventually emigrated to the United States in 1939. She bounced between New York and Hollywood, where she hung out with movie stars and exiled aristocrats. (Pictured is the 1929 Portrait of Mrs. Rufus Bush.)

Her artistic career as "The Baroness with the Brush" waned as her style of Cubism meets Art Deco suddenly felt old-fashioned, particularly when depicting more serious themes such as starving refugees and penitent Madonnas. (Pictured is the 1931 The Refugees,)

There is an amusing wall sign describing Tamara's foray into San Francisco for a 1941 gallery show at Courvoisier Galleries. "While Lempicka's flawless pictorial technique received praise at the time, the sentimental pauperism and overly religious nature of her subjects was deemed insincere and passe by the press. The mild reception the artist received was counterbalanced by the social excitement with which she was welcomed by local high society, including Helen de Young Cameron...who threw cocktail and dinner parties for the mysterious baroness." It only seems fitting that the deYoung Museum should be the site of her posthumous retrospective. (Pictured is the 1937 Madonna,)