In 1901, the Bernheim-Jeune brothers were the preeminent dealers of impressionist art in Paris. They decided to organize a posthumous retrospective of an unknown post-impressionist artist. Vincent van Gogh’s sister-in-law, Jo, used that exhibition to popularize his art.
A similar phenomenon is playing out with Tamara de Lempicka. Her paintings are being featured in a major retrospective at The Baker Museum in Naples.
“Lempicka is an iconic art deco painter, and I think that comes across well in this exhibition,” observed The Baker Museum Chief Curator Courtney McNeil. “It's not only the fact that she's an art deco painter, but she uses art deco fashion in the paintings, which is an added bonus.”
McNeil credited her counterpart at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Furio Rinaldi, as Lempicka’s chief proponent.
“He's from Europe, from Italy originally, and he'd realized that U.S. museums did not have significant collections of her work and there had never been a United States major retrospective of her work,” said McNeil. “So, he put this exhibition together.”
While Lempicka’s work may not have been on the radar of U.S. museums, two local collectors were well aware of her importance to the art deco movement and have been collecting her paintings for years.
“Patty and Jay Baker of Naples happen to have the most important private holding of Lempicka's paintings in any collection I'm aware of in the United States, public or private,” McNeil said. “Their participation in the San Francisco and Houston show opened the door for us to have the conversation with those museums about bringing the show here.”
This stunning exhibition, which covers most of The Baker Museum’s second floor, is on display through Feb. 8.
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The Bernheim-Jeune brothers, Josse and Gaston, rose to prominence in the 1890s. By 1901, they brokered the art of such impressionist luminaries as Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Cezanne, Seurat, Signac and Bonnard, and introduced to the global art market Vuillard, Matisse, Rousseau, Raoul Dufy, Vlaminck, Modigliani and Utrillo. Their establishment on the Boulevard de la Madeleine became known as the “Gallery of the Avant Garde” and their couriers took trains to Russia, Switzerland, Germany and England to deliver and hang paintings in the homes of their new owners.
With respect to the 1901 van Gogh retrospective, Bernheim-Jeune brothers and their father, Alexandre, were assisted by Julien Leclerq and Claude-Emil Schuffenecker, a turn-of-the-century painter and collector who was known to have forged works by Cezanne and van Gogh. The Bernheim-Jeune show contained 71 works and it was here that van Gogh first came to broad public attention.
There’s no reference to van Gogh’s sister-in-law, Jo, in connection with the 1901 retrospective, but she was undoubtedly involved. She’d promised her husband, Theo, on his deathbed that she would do her utmost to promote his brother’s work and on the heels of the 1901 Bernheim-Jeune retrospective, she arranged a major 1905 exhibition at Amsterdam’s leading modern-art institution, the Stedelijk Museum. There, she took full control, creating the posters, inviting the guests, and curating the exhibition. With nearly 500 paintings, it remains the largest Van Gogh exhibition ever staged. With market interest then fully piqued, Jo carefully selected the paintings that would appear for sale at galleries in Berlin, Paris, and Copenhagen and by 1916, Vincent’s status in Europe was secured.
Today, van Goghs sell for tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. For example, “Portrait of Dr Paul Gachet” sold at Christie’s for $83 million in 1990. It held the record as the most expensive Van Gogh ever sold until 2022, when “Orchard with Cypresses” was purchased at Christie’s from the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen for $117 million. These are not isolated sales. “Labourer in a Field” fetched $81 million in 2017; “Self-Portrait without a Beard” sold for $72 million in 1998; and “Wooden Cabins among the Olive Trees and Cypresses” went for $71 million on 2021.
When it comes to record auction prices, Tamara de Lempicka is no slouch. Her 1932 painting “Portrait de Marjorie Ferry” (1932) sold at Christie’s London in 2020 for $21.1 million, breaking the previous record set just three months earlier when “La Tunique Rose” sold for $13.3 million at Sotheby’s in New York. Lempicka’s top six sales have all taken place in the past seven years. The current high-water mark represents a nearly 150 percent increase from the pre-2018 record of $8.48 million, which had stood since 2011.
All 10 of Tamara de Lempicka’s top-selling works are portraits of women.
That may soon change. Christie’s London is preparing to auction a “seductive” painting of a male subject that hasn’t been seen on the market in 40 years. “Portrait du Docteur Boucard” (1928) depicts Pierre Boucard, a doctor and bacteriologist who invented the probiotic Lactéol, which is still used to promote gut health today. The painting features the tools of Boucard’s trade, a microscope and test tube. While it will likely not top “Portrait of Marjorie Ferry” or “La Tunique Rose,” it is expected to bring between $6 and $10 million.
After decades in obscurity, the artist’s reputation is on the upswing. In addition to Jay and Patty Baker, her work is collected by celebrities including Madonna, Jack Nicholson and Barbra Streisand. The artist’s instantly recognizable style is a large part of the appeal.
“By the time museums in the United States could have afforded to buy her paintings, she was out of fashion and people weren't aware of her work,” McNeil remarked. “She experienced this major resurgence thanks to keen-eyed private collectors in the United States and in Europe. The rise was astronomical and now most museums are not able to acquire her works. Some of the very best works remain in private collections as well as in some European collections.”
The retrospective at The Baker Museum is designed to introduce Lempicka and her body of work to the public. It originated at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. The show then traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. The Baker Museum show is a small version of those exhibitions.
“It’s scaled to fit our spaces here,” McNeil noted, “but keeps intact all of the major themes of the [San Francisco] exhibition. So we're exploring this remarkable artist's career from her earliest days to the end of her life, looking at her different styles, her techniques, as well as her place within this really exciting moment in art history.”
McNeil is referring to the art deco movement, which began in 1925-26.
“When you look at her work, you absolutely know the time in which it was created,” McNeil observed. “She was portraying very fashionable people at the height of fashion during this period, and they have that unmistakable art deco look to them, absolutely. I would even describe some of her portraits as architectural."
De Lempicka was once quoted as saying: “Among a hundred paintings, you could always recognize mine. The galleries…put me in the best rooms, always in the centre, because my painting attracted people. It was neat, it was finished.”
“She treats the people in her portraits as solid forms with a great deal of presence, a conspicuous lack of softness and a lot of straight lines and sharp corners,” McNeil explained. “It's a really remarkable approach.”
Lempicka’s bold art deco style oozes cool elegance. Her portraits evoked the glamour, optimism and extravagance of that age, and she welcomed media attention, regularly inviting photographers to her studio to shoot her.
“This show is interesting not just because Tamara's work is beautiful and compelling and a wonderful window into the time period that she was operating in,” noted McNeil. “It’s also a fascinating story about Tamara herself as a person - the background she came from, the challenges she overcame and the identity she carved for herself in the artistic world at a time that presented many challenges to women artists in general.” [That story will be told on WGCU in a subsequent segment.]
One work that is illustrative of her distinctive style is “Girl in Pink.”
“One of her favorite subjects was her daughter, Kizette,” McNeil noted. “Kizette is Lempicka's only daughter, only child, and she painted her many times. But ‘Girl in Pink’ or ‘Kizette in Pink’ is, in my opinion, the very best of those portraits. She's showing Kizette in her element, in her tennis attire and reading a book. She was a great athlete and she loved reading, so she's showing her in an environment that was very much her. But at the same time, it's painted in such a way that any potential patron could look at this and envision themselves being painted by Lempicka because the talent is so overt.”
The record reflects that mother and daughter had a complicated relationship. In all likelihood, Lempicka did not paint her daughter out of love or devotion, but rather to showcase her talent as a painter adept at rendering full-scale portraits. So, she used subjects from her personal life as muses or models for studies to solicit commissioned work.
“It displays all of the classic art deco architectural elements,” McNeil pointed out. “The buildings in the background, the chair she is lounging in, even the design of the blouse that’s part of her tennis outfit.”
From her coiffed hair and arresting blue eyes, Kizette exudes the kind of sophistication Lempicka’s clients demanded.
Like the rest of her best works, “Kizette in Pink” reflects a masterful blend of the classical and the contemporary. Lempicka attributed the former to a tour of Italy her grandmother took her on when Lempicka was a teen. It allowed her to “take in the treasures of the Italian Old Masters’ — as a formative influence. ‘[It was then] that my love of painting, and my desire to become a painter, were born,’” she said.
For “Kizette in Pink,” Lempicka embraced the mannerist ideal of figura serpentinata, in which the subject rotates around a presumed central axis in which Kizette’s legs and feet face in one direction while her torso, shoulders and head subtly rotate in almost the opposite direction, thus creating a sense of movement. The girl looks fidgety, as though ready to launch herself off her chair at a moment’s notice.
The portrait also displays a number of other modern aspects, such as the tight cropping popular in the cinema of the day. The cubist backdrop hints at an urban mise en scène, with several tall buildings. Finally, the painting’s metallic sheen alludes to the advances of the machine age.
McNeil also points to Kizette’s hands, particularly her fingers.
“Fingers are really hard to paint,” she said. “I'm not an artist, but I've heard this again and again and based on my observations of art over the years, hands and fingers are very easy to paint badly. So, I have great admiration for the way Lempicka would render them. I'm not going to think that that's a real hand, but it's beautifully, beautifully done. It's got this stylized aspect to it.”
“Brilliance” is another painting that incorporates all of the hallmarks of Lempicka’s mature style.
“It's a little more emotional,” McNeil noted. “The eyes of the figure have so much depth that it really invites you to kind of gaze into the soul, and the hair is the most ribbon-like hair of any of her works. They remind me of curls of metal almost.”
Pointing to the grapes surrounding the subject’s head, McNeil mentioned that “Brilliance” is a homage to Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, revelry, fertility and ecstasy known for bringing joy, liberation and madness through wine, music and dance.
“So, she's looking again at classical imagery and art from earlier time periods."
In typical Lempicka fashion, the grapes are solid and look as though they are made of glass. They are also replicated in her subject’s eyes.
“I would really describe Lempicka's work as the type of work that needs to be enjoyed in person,” said McNeil. “It reproduces beautifully online, but you just can't get a full sense of the power of her work without seeing it in person. It's astonishing the level of finish that she's able to achieve.”
During her life, Tamara de Lempicka’s career experienced ebbs and flows. She enjoyed periods of fame and tremendous success in Europe but never achieved that recognition in the United States during her lifetime.
The Baker Museum includes 17 galleries, an art library with a collection of more than 4,200 books, and a 17,650-square-foot addition designed by Weiss/Manfredi that opened in 2019. Special features include four large-scale installations by popular glass artist Dale Chihuly and a notable collection of outdoor sculpture installed throughout the Kimberly K. Querrey and Louis A. Simpson Cultural Campus.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
