When you see a painting by Tamara de Lempicka, you can't help but get closer and take a closer look. “It’s really exquisite,” said Furio Rinaldi, one of the curators of the first Lempicka retrospective in the United States. "You can't see the brushstrokes. They're just polished and incredibly thoughtful. It's a very clean way of painting."

These fascinating works of decorative arts are now on display at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. (The exhibition will travel to Houston this spring.)

So what makes a painting so characteristic of Lempicka?

"Geometry," Rinaldi said. "Everything is reduced to its basic form. Another aspect of Lempicka is that she derives directly from the examples provided by the old masters of Europe. So, all of these things mix together to create a language that is not only completely unique but also completely modern."

Born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz in Poland in 1894, Tamara eventually moved to St. Petersburg, where she married aristocratic lawyer Tadeusz Łempicki Junosza) gets married. In 1917, the Russian Revolution forced the couple and their young daughter to flee to Paris. "Paris was just recovering from the end of the first war," Rinaldi said. "People are hopeful about the future and confident about what's to come."

In Paris she began painting, initially out of financial necessity, under the name Lempicka.

"She captured an exciting moment of empowerment and liberation for queer people in Paris," Rinaldi said.

Some of the women she painted were her lovers. "Women's bodies are no longer hidden or constrained as they were in the past decade," Rinaldi said. "It's famous for its shape."

He describes a painting by her lover, the poet Ella Perrault: "The figure in the painting does not even look at us, her eroticism. She simply lives in her own world. Her gaze is detached and completely dispassionate ”

Every time Lempicka sells a painting, she buys something of her own: a diamond bracelet. According to Marisa de Lempicka, the artist's great-granddaughter, this was for protection: "If she had to escape again, she could take these bracelets with her. She could survive again."

"She always has to think about saving herself?" I asked.

"Yes, herself and her family."

Indeed, her concerns were well founded. In 1939, on the eve of the outbreak of World War II, Lempicka and her second husband, a Jewish baron, fled Europe for the United States. She continued painting for another forty years until her death in 1980.

When asked whether her great-grandmother felt a sense of her legacy at the end of her life, Marisa de Lampica responded: “She was the focus of a small town in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. She was very famous. Then she moved to the United States and, you know, abstract expressionism was popular, so she kind of fell out of favor."

"Why do you think we don't know her name and her story?"

“I think of her as a female artist,” Marissa said. "How many female artists can we name that are out there in the public eye? Very, very few."

But Lempicka is now back in the public eye. last year, she was the subject of a broadway showher works continue to sell for millions of dollars. Collectors include Barbra Streisand and Madonna, who even included Lempicka's paintings in her music videos.

When asked what she wanted the public to know about Tamara de Lempicka, Marissa responded: “I want people to see her art and learn about her life and feel empowered and To be inspired to live your own life and your own dreams I know that's what Tamara means."

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Story by Sarah Kugel. Editor: Chad Kadin.