Updated on Oct. 10
In the new documentary about Tamara de Lempicka, a Polish artist with a complicated relationship to Judaism and one of the most iconic artists of the Art Deco era, the director offers a gem of a Lempicka quote: “There are no miracles. There is only what you make.”
It’s a clue to the character of an artist whose ambition to create a new visual language for the 20th century was matched only by her drive to succeed at a time when social barriers were rampant. Her genius at portraiture captured subjects across the social spectrum, while her Jewish origins remained in the shadows. Were she not a woman, the film’s multiple interviewees posit, and were antisemitism not such a major factor in her time, she would likely be a household name.
That may be about to change, at least in the Bay Area. “The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka and the Art of Survival” will mark its world premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival on Oct. 11 and screen again Oct. 13, with the two dates sandwiching the opening of a Lempicka retrospective at the de Young Museum on Oct. 12.
Both the world premiere and the museum opening coincide with Yom Kippur. But director Julie Rubio said the film festival added a second screening so that people who observe the holy day could see the documentary too.
The exhibition, which runs through Feb. 9, will be the first major museum retrospective in the United States, though Lempicka has been celebrated in many of the big city museums of Europe.
“How it happened that my film and the exhibition have coincided was just serendipity,” Rubio told J. in a Zoom interview from her Orinda home. “Everything just kind of collided in such a beautiful way. It really is Tamara de Lempicka’s time.”
Rubio, a multifaceted filmmaker and current president of Women in Film SF Bay Area, first laid eyes on some of Lempicka’s paintings more than 20 years ago and retained a fascination with the artist ever since. Rubio, who is Latina, said she empathized with the artist’s need to finesse the prejudice in her surroundings. She was also gobsmacked by the fluid sexuality that Lempicka expressed in her art and life.
Rubio was able to connect with Lempicka’s granddaughter Victoria and great-granddaughters Marisa and Cristina (who all use the surname de Lempicka). They were interested in bringing Tamara’s life story to the screen. Rubio began working on a screenplay for a feature film, but fundraising was a challenge. During the Covid-19 pandemic, one of Rubio’s colleagues suggested they instead make a documentary. That proved doable, with several of her Women in Film colleagues, husband Blake Wellen and son Elijah Stavena working together.
“I just wanted to make something authentic and organic, that was honest and of the truth,” Rubio said. “I had to change gears, and so did the family, and I’m grateful that now they’ve watched the film, Marisa said that Tamara is giving her blessings from above.”
One achievement of the film is that it helps to dispel the cloud of uncertainty around Lempicka’s Jewish origins. In the annals of the art world, Lempicka had been known as a Polish woman who came from wealth and married into more of it: with her first husband, the prominent Polish lawyer Tadeusz Lempicki, then her second husband, the Hungarian Jewish Baron Raoul Kuffner. Although she never self-identified publicly as a Jew, she was banned from Germany during Hitler’s rise and knew enough to flee Austria just ahead of the Holocaust.
Lempicka’s descendants were also seeking documentation of her Jewish antecedents. The artist, who was born in 1894 and died in 1980, had done little to inform them.
The film follows Rubio’s pursuit of information in Europe: a Polish producer locates the graves of Lempicka’s grandparents in Warsaw’s Jewish cemetery; and a Polish historian digs up papers in a Moscow archive showing that Lempicka’s parents, last name Hurwitz, were baptized in 1891, followed by Tamara and her siblings in 1897.
The family’s baptisms are movingly contextualized in the documentary by Polish broadcast journalist Monika Krawjewska, who attests that most Polish Jewish conversions around the turn of the century were done out of fear.
“It was not difficult to convince others that she was Catholic because most Poles are Catholic. I think it was a good idea to lie that way,” Krajewska says. “Why did she lie? There are many reasons. Being Jewish in the first half of the 20th century brought with it many unpleasant consequences.”
Indeed.
Paula Birnbaum, a professor of art history and museum studies at the University of San Francisco, studied Lempicka for a 2011 book on European women artists between the two world wars. She offered her insights in the film, describing the long shadow of antisemitism cast in the 1890s by the Dreyfus Affair, in which French courts convicted Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus on flimsy espionage charges.
“I think people had various reactions to ‘passing,’” Birnbaum told J. “Some artists were proud of and actively celebrated their Jewish identity, like Chana Orloff, and of course, Marc Chagall, while others changed their names, or did not want to be associated with it.”
Rubio came to believe that Lempicka downplaying her Jewish heritage “was not an act of deceit, or vanity,” she told J. “I think it was a necessary protection against persecution, and I think a lot of contemporary researchers have overlooked this vital chapter of her life. These elements of who she is … speak volumes about the incredible strength and resilience of her whole family, including herself, and what she did to protect them.”
That Tamara de Lempicka so deliberately tended her public image wherever she lived, leveraging her money, talent and taste for beauty to achieve recognition, is central to the exploration of the person behind this incredible body of work.
“Tamara de Lempicka was openly bisexual, so in a way we are very happy that the first American retrospective will be held in San Francisco,” Furio Rinaldi, co-curator of the de Young show, proudly comments in Rubio’s film.
That’s another clue to Lempicka’s mystique. An avid eroticism animates her nude paintings, and her scandalous parties in 1920s Paris likely brought more clientele to her door, the film suggests. But these were choices Lempicka freely aired, while she did not share her family background.
Rubio explores these two strands of Lempicka’s identity, along with testimonies to her extraordinary talent, in a 96-minute documentary that floods the screen with vivid images of her prodigious output. Her body of work included not only the commissioned portraits of glamorous men and women, owned today by the likes of Madonna, Barbara Streisand, Angelica Huston and Jack Nicholson, but also paintings of her family, friends and lovers. She used people she encountered in her everyday life as her models, including many people of color. The source for one heartbreaking painting of refugees is unknown.
Notwithstanding the variety of her subjects, “Each of my paintings is a self-portrait,” she once wrote, as quoted in the film.
“Tamara broke down barriers and opened doors for female artists; she led them into a world of endless creative choice,” Rubio narrates in conclusion. “She put her struggle, turmoil … and truth onto the canvas. There you can see her humanity, staring at you, exposing her secrets for all to witness.”