The de Young Museum in San Francisco will host the first major retrospective of Polish Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka in North America this fall, organized by curator Furio Rinaldi with Gioia Mori. The exhibition, titled “Tamara de Lempicka,” brings together her ultramodern masterpieces—including loans from the Centre Pompidou—and explores her lesser-known design process, biography, and evolving identities. It will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in spring 2025.
The retrospective matters because it fills a significant gap in U.S. art history programming for a trailblazing female artist beloved by celebrity collectors like Madonna and Barbra Streisand. By presenting Lempicka’s work chronologically and thematically—covering her Russian heritage, mannerist influences, society portraits, and depictions of the “New Woman”—the show aims to offer a more complex, three-dimensional understanding of an artist often reduced to a poster girl for Art Deco.