{"id":3206,"date":"2025-04-04T22:56:03","date_gmt":"2025-04-04T22:56:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/04\/04\/review-tamara-de-lempicka-at-the-museum-of-fine-arts-houston\/"},"modified":"2025-04-04T22:56:04","modified_gmt":"2025-04-04T22:56:04","slug":"review-tamara-de-lempicka-at-the-museum-of-fine-arts-houston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/04\/04\/review-tamara-de-lempicka-at-the-museum-of-fine-arts-houston\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: \u2018Tamara de Lempicka\u2019 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Tamara de Lempicka, Portrait of Ira P.,<\/em> 1930; oil on panel, private collection. \u00a9 2024 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC \/ ADAGP, Paris \/ ARS, NY.Image \u00a9 1969 Christie\u2019s Images Limited<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Welcome to<\/i> One Fine Show<\/i><\/a>, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.<\/i><\/p>\n

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Something tells me that Art Deco will survive any waves of art censorship that may or may not emanate from the United States government in the future. There\u2019s just something so American about a work that could be used to illustrate the cover of an Ayn Rand<\/a> novel. The enduring aesthetics of the era have even led to a new musical version of The Great Gatsby<\/i> on Broadway<\/a>, where influencers receive hand fans reading \u201cTeam Gatsby\u201d or \u201cTeam Daisy.\u201d Maybe I\u2019ll see it if they make one that says \u201cTeam Jordan Baker.\u201d<\/p>\n

Someone else who might be said to be on that team is the artist Tamara de Lempicka<\/a> (1894-1980), whose eponymous show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston represents the first major museum survey devoted to the artist in the United States. The show comes from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and explores the Polish painter\u2019s trenchant, sensual style across a career that saw her zoom through the Roaring Twenties and eventually careen into that great wall of the 20th Century, World War II.<\/p>\n

Lempicka\u2019s aesthetics<\/a> are so associated with the essence of Art Deco that pictures of her work probably exist next to its definition in some dictionaries. Take Portrait of Ira P.<\/i> (1930), in which our many cornered heroine pushes against a wall. Difficult to tell if she\u2019s trying to break through or just support it like a column. Her rich thighs resemble those of a sculpture at a Greek temple and she carries a cluster of flowers that look like they were done in marble.<\/p>\n

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SEE ALSO: Art Collector Athanasios Polychronopoulos Is Bringing A.I. Art to Delphi <\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI had to have it,\u201d writes the painting\u2019s one-time owner Barbra Streisand<\/a> in the catalogue\u2019s preface, \u201cbecause I was designing an Art Deco screening room for my Beverly Hills house in shades of gray, red and black . . . and she would look perfect there.\u201d<\/p>\n

(The catalogue is very good in general, reprinting Fran\u00e7oise Gilot\u2019s 1980 Vogue article in which she talks about Lempicka\u2019s unreciprocated friendship overtures in Paris: \u201cSo much Slavic dynamism paralyzed me.\u201d)<\/p>\n

But it isn\u2019t all \u00fcberfrauen looking sharp in every sense. There were many nudes in Paris in the \u201820s. Though Lempicka does wonders with angels, we have to praise her work with lighting and shadows. Her nudes seem to view humanity as a fleshy blob, with men and women looking much the same in the chest area. In her work, everyone is much sexier with their clothes on. You should see how the subject in Portrait of Doctor Pierre Boucard<\/i> (1928) handles a test tube.<\/p>\n

Her sexiness has a brooding intensity that conquers the potentially overwhelming settings, and by this metric, the artist\u2019s self-portrait may be her sexiest work of all. Titled My Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti)<\/i> (1929), you\u2019ve seen this image before. It is post-Cubist in the way that the geometry doesn\u2019t quite make sense. The artist\u2019s eyes slide past the car\u2019s interior, past the viewer, to something in the distance, something that needs to be conquered. Less than a quarter of this alleged portrait is given over to skin, but this isn\u2019t about a desire to merge with technology. There\u2019s no ambiguity about who\u2019s driving this car.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/b>Tamara de Lempicka<\/b><\/a>\u201c<\/b> is on view at the <\/b>Museum of Fine Arts, Houston<\/b> through May 26, 2025.<\/b><\/p>\n

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