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The Great Lempicka O ne of the shows of the spring is also a dark horse. It's the tale of an Art Deco queen whose bold portraits were recherché for a while — despite being collected by Madonna, Barbra Streisand, and Jack Nicholson — only to be rediscovered yet again and brought into wider public focus as one of the more shape-shifting artists of the 20th century. This grande dame of the Jazz Age embodied the streamlined glamour of the Deco era even as it confined her. Lempicka's smoldering portraits are so identified with the period that one appears on the cover of art historian Edward Lucie-Smith's seminal 1990 book, Art Deco Painting. This season, Lempicka charges back into the zeitgeist. She has become relevant for a fresh generation, not only for her narrative but for her inimitable and unmistakable style, one where bravura technique and bold image-making crafted canvases as unforgettable as Frida Kahlo's works. PaperCity first examined Tamara de Lempicka in December 2020, when we published our account of her era in Texas — a unique and happy chapter that unfolded while her daughter (and subject) Baroness Kizette de Lempicka-Foxhall resided in Houston. During Lempicka's sojourn in Houston, she made a dazzling impression with her strikingly designed residences: first, a suite at the Warwick Hotel; later, an apartment at Regency House, and a house at 3235 Reba Drive that she decorated for her daughter. Lempicka, a bejeweled and caftaned regular at the symphony and theater, enjoyed swank luncheons at the Warwick and Houston Racquet Club, and cultivated friendships with Jane Blaffer Owen and Kitzia Poniatowska (Mrs. Conrad Moore), descendant of the last king of Poland, Stanislaw Poniatowski. Lempicka was known then as Baroness Kuffner, after her second husband, Baron Raoul Kuffner. The widowed royal shed her artist identity and became a patron; she was often featured in society columns, including a 1964 profile by Houston Chronicle fine arts editor Ann Holmes: "Baroness Brings Along Furniture — And Collection of Art, Stories." Lempicka eventually decamped to sunnier climes in Cuernavaca, where she had a second home and would spend her final years. Consequently, her time in Texas faded from memory — analogous perhaps to her lapse in the art-historical narrative, with the rise of new trends in contemporary a r t : m i n i m a l i s m , c o n c e p t u a l i s m , installation art. Tamara de Lempicka's full place in this canon had largely been limited to the parameters of the Deco era, a side note to the global art market. But all that changed in the flurry of one auction at Christie's London in February 2020, when a canvas that offered a glamorous ode to a Parisian cabaret chanteuse, Portrait de Marjorie Ferry (1932), sold for $21.1 million. That sale propelled de Lempicka into the stratosphere and made her work number eight among the top 10 Impressionist and modern lots sold in 2020. Two years later, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco began organizing the blockbuster show "Tamara de Lempicka" and reached out to the MFAH to become a collaborator. The resulting exhibition arrived last month in Houston, its second and final stop. The expansive show brings together more than 90 paintings and Tamara de Lempicka, pictured in "At Home in Zebra Lamé," Houston Chronicle, May 19, 1965. The rediscovery of Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka (1894-1980) is the art story of the year. As the artist's first American museum show lands at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Catherine D. Anspon recalls the artist's lost Texas chapter and queries MFAH curator Alison de Lima Greene about why Lempicka is a talent for our times. FROM THE BOOK TAMARA DE LEMPICKA BY GIOIA MORI AND FURIO RINALDI (YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS © 2024). COLLECTION OF RICHARD AND ANNE PADDY, UNITED STATES. PHOTO BY TOM COLBURN.