Art Deco diva Tamara de Lempicka arrives at the Jewish Museum with her most iconic portraits.

Behind this woman of immense character and immaculate face, behind her perfect, colorful, and refined portraits , there is much to discover in the life and work of Tamara de Lempicka (1894-1980), considered the "diva of Art Deco." A pioneer of her time.

Part of the mystery of that singular life can now be explored at the Jewish Museum , which inaugurated the exhibition Tamara de Lempicka at Libertad 769 (CABA), in collaboration with the Polish Embassy in Buenos Aires. In addition, during the exhibition's opening , a previously unseen documentary about her life and work was screened for the first time. This documentary explores the career of this remarkable artist, a lucid and free-thinking woman through her art and words, in the year of Art Deco, no less.

The great Polish artist of Jewish roots lived her life as best she could, escaping from two countries at war. And also as she wished, amidst art, luxury, glamour, and aristocracy: she moved from Poland, her native country, to Paris. But, faced with the advance of the Russian Revolution and, above all, Nazism, she had to change continents and settled in the United States. She later moved to Mexico, where she died in 1980. Long before that, she had married the man who had given her her daughter, Kizette; she also had relationships with other women and once again sought love with a wealthy man who had commissioned a portrait of her for his lover.

However, Lempicka always fought for women's freedom , for equal rights and against lesbianism, for the portraits and nudes that established her as an avant-garde artist who captivated different generations for more than a hundred years.

Influenced by Cubism , her works have fetched millions of dollars in auctions at prestigious auction houses such as Christie's and Sotheby's. She has even been a muse to Hollywood celebrities such as Barbra Streisand, Madonna, and Jack Nicholson , among others, who are fans of her life and work.

The exhibition is organized by the Jewish Museum of Buenos Aires - Temple of Liberty, belonging to the Judaica Foundation Network, together with the Polish Embassy in Buenos Aires, which provided replicas of Lempicka's works for the exhibition .

The works will be on display until September 9 (entrance is required by showing a passport or ID prior to paying a contribution bond), but there will be no further screening of the documentary. “It's a very large international exhibition. In 2024, it was shown in two major museums in the United States: the San Francisco Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Now it's coming to Buenos Aires and other museums around the world alongside the documentary 'The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka and the Art of Surviving,' by Julie Rubio. It's revealing,” says Tamara Kohn, director of the Jewish Museum .

The exhibition features reproductions of around twenty of Tamara de Lempicka's most iconic works , in collaboration with the Polish Embassy in Argentina. They are replicas of the Polish painter's finest portraits, as the originals are held by private collectors . Most of the portraits on display date from the 1920s, with Art Deco as their symbol.

The legendary self-portrait of De Lempicka driving a green Bugatti (1929) stands out, before the financial crash of 1930. It shows a modern, independent, self-confident woman, free from the prejudices of being a woman and possessing an impassive gaze, at a time when driving luxury cars was exclusively for wealthy men. It is a true reflection of how life was at that time.

"The Girl with Gloves" (1930) is another of de Lempicka's famous portraits: an unforgettable painting, replicated throughout, depicting a woman wearing an emerald-green dress, matching the young model's eyes, and wearing a white hat. Pure Hollywood glamour in the 1930s.

"Portrait of Mrs. Bush" (1929) is another of the "de Lempicka" paintings on display at the Jewish Museum and belongs to a private collection. It was commissioned by Rufus Busch , a powerful American oil businessman and owner of the Bush Tower skyscrapers in New York, to Tamara of his fiancée Joan Jeffrey, who is wearing a spectacular, bright red dress. Behind her, some of the Manhattan skyscrapers can be seen, a characteristic of several of her works.

The painting was supposedly a wedding gift. It was with this painting that de Lempicka traveled to the United States for the first time . After the Bush family's divorce, the work was forgotten for more than 60 years until Christie's sold it at a record auction in 2004 for $4.6 million.

There's more to de Lempicka at the Jewish Museum, such as her portrait of her daughter Kizette in a pink dress (1926), a maternal symbol that the artist expressed to her beloved daughter through her paintings. The original is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, France.

There is also another of "Adam and Eve" (1931), belonging to a private collection. To represent Adam, the artist called upon a policeman she met on the streets of Paris. Meanwhile, a professional model played Eve. De Lempicka considered this painting one of her greatest achievements. The American singer Barbra Streisand had once purchased the original.

“First, there was the exhibition, our idea, then we discovered there was a documentary that tells the life story of Tamara de Lempicka and the entire artistic process. We found it very interesting,” revealed Alicja Tunk, Cultural Attaché at the Polish Embassy.

The one-and-a-half-hour film explores the life and work of Tamara de Lempicka as never before seen, showcasing little-known aspects of this unforgettable artist. It features contributions from American actress Anjelica Houston, and Hollywood-style narration from art critics and her immediate family.

Many of the facts and stories that were hidden are reasons not only for concealment but for survival, and also for resilience as a woman and as an artist. According to the documentary, Tamara Rosalia Hurwitz (not Gurwik-Górsk) was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1894, not in 1898 as previously believed. Her father, Boris Gurwik-Górsk, was a successful Jewish lawyer of Russian origin, and her mother, Malwina Dekler, belonged to the Polish-Jewish aristocracy.

Tamara became famous for portraying Parisian high society , as well as the nights out, parties, orgies, and bisexuality she was beginning to experience, which are part of the myths of this great artist.

In addition to hiding his name, he also concealed his Jewish identity , a characteristic of the era, given the rise of antisemitism and Nazi persecution that prevailed in the Old Continent before and during World War II (1939-1945). This is one of the main reasons for the exhibition at the Jewish Museum.

“Tamara had a hidden Jewish identity, with baptisms in her family and struggles with that complex Jewish identity so typical of the early 20th century: to be part of the world and the art scene, you had to be baptized and Christian. That has to do with that very complex identity: she ended up leaving due to fascist persecution in Europe and ended up being exiled,” Kohn recalls.

In 1929, she divorced Tadeusz Lempicka, even erasing his wedding ring in one of the portraits he painted of her, which is on display at the Jewish Museum. That same year, she met the Hungarian Baron Raoul Kuffner, the leading private collector of her work.

In 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, De Lempicka and Baron Kuffner moved from Paris to the United States , where she brought her European Art Deco world to American culture, achieving resounding success photographing businessmen, aristocrats, and Hollywood stars. She threw lavish parties at her home in California and also surrounded herself with Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Greta Garbo, and Rita Hayworth . Because of her lifestyle and her work, she was nicknamed the "Diva of Art Deco."

His exhibitions in this style sparked a great enthusiasm in galleries and museums in Los Angeles, Houston, and New York, generating profound admiration for his impactful works. As a result, many of his paintings were auctioned for record prices for the time or sold to private collectors.

Tamara de Lempicka , at the Jewish Museum (Libertad 769) Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed on national and Jewish holidays. Until September 9.