Tamara de Lempicka: Modern Maverick
Presentation by Alison de Lima Greene, Houston (TX)

Join curator Alison de Lima Greene for an introduction to the remarkable arc of Lempicka’s career as she rose to the pinnacle of café society in 1920s and 1930s Paris, and her American odyssey after she fled Europe in 1939.

Image above: Tamara de Lempicka, Portrait of a Young Woman in a Blue Dress, 1922, oil on canvas, private collection © 2025 Tamara de Lempicka Estate, LLC / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, NY, Image © 2023 Christie’s Images Limited

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. Currently the subject of the first retrospective devoted to her work in the United States, organized by the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums and currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Lempicka’s singular contribution to the history of modernism is only now becoming widely known.

Born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz in Poland in an era of fierce anti-Semitism, she learned at an early age to conceal her Jewish ancestry. In 1916, she married a Polish aristocrat, Tadeusz Lempicki, and the two settled briefly in St. Petersburg before fleeing to Paris in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Faced with the need to earn money, Lempicka determined to become an artist: she first presented her paintings at the Salon d’Automne in 1922 under the name “Monsieur Łempitzky,” and then more forthrightly as “Tamara de Lempicka” as she established an internationally acclaimed career.

Lempicka’s second marriage, to Austro-Hungarian Baron Raoul Kuffner-de Diószegh, granted her the title “Baroness Kuffner,” the name she took with her to the United States in 1939 in advance of the German invasion of Paris. After 1945 Lempicka divided her time between New York, Paris, and Houston where her daughter Kizette had settled, and she spent her final years in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Alison de Lima Greene is the Isabel Brown Wilson Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she has served on the curatorial staff since 1984. A member of the curatorial team responsible for the inaugural presentations in the MFAH’s new Nancy and Rich Kinder Building in 2020, her recent exhibitions include Philip Guston Now, organized in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Tate London.
Ms. Greene was a 2010 Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership and has served as vice president and trustee of the Association of Art Museum Curators; she is currently on the advisory boards of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College and The Barnett Newman Foundation.

This event is part of the online series “Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression.”
Presented in connection with Jewish American Heritage Month.

The exhibition Tamara de Lempicka is on view through July 6, 2025 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (TX).