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.
