The San Francisco museum hosts the first major retrospective of the art deco icon in the US
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With over 150 works on display, “Tamara de Lempicka” at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, sets out to present a new perspective of the 20th-century Polish artist’s career. In addition to celebrated portraits, such as “Young Girl in Green,” 1929, the exhibition includes a number of rarely seen drawings, experimental still lifes from Lempicka’s early years in Paris and a special section on the works she produced for the German fashion magazine “Die Dame”, including the famous cover “Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti,” 1928.
The exhibition unfolds chronologically, so as to best present the evolution of Lempicka’s art deco aesthetic, which combined a classical figural style with the modern energy of the international avant-garde. “She defined her own style,” said exhibition curator Furio Rinaldi, in an interview with Sotheby’s.
Also featured in the show are Lempicka’s lesser-known still lifes and domestic interiors of the 1930s and late 1940s, executed after her departure from Europe to the United States in 1939. “She reinvented herself as the ‘Baroness with a Brush,’” says Rinaldi. “And became a herald of the grand European pictorial tradition. So in Europe, she was the vessel of modernity, while in America, almost the opposite.”
Image: “Jeune fille en vert (Young Woman in Green),” Tamara de Lempicka, 1930-31
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