Tamara de Lempicka (1894–1980) has always been enveloped in a (couture) cloak of mystery, much of it of her own design, created by a disarming, if also disingenuous, vagueness in the telling of her life story that was only loosely fitted to facts. Her art, once hailed as an embodiment of modernity, of Art Deco and the Paris of the 1920s and ‘30s, has roller-coastered through the ensuing years—forgotten, revived, then forgotten again.
She has always had her fierce supporters—lauded as a feminist by some—as well as her scathing critics, who dismissed her work as superficial, decorative, too feminine, not feminine enough, soft porn, or even fascistic. Her period of greatest acclaim was in Paris in the exhilarating, extravagant interwar years, a milieu that Lempicka embraced and was embraced by,…
