Tamara de Lempicka at the De Young

The hotel looked cute on Expedia. It’s an old San Francisco building with those famous bay windows. My cab driver was surprised to discover its existence. I have now learned that $200 a night in San Francisco gets you a clean but basic traveler’s hotel. Most of the units have shared baths on the hallway. This hotel is for college kids and hipsters on the cheap.

The hotel is very basic and quite shabby with lots of renovation in process. Plastic sheets cover the hall carpet where the walls are being resurfaced on every floor. It smells like the carpet was just cleaned. It felt slightly damp under my sock feet.

The hotel has no amenities except wifi and a coffee machine. When I arrived I had to go find a bodega to buy toothpaste.Are they called bodegas in San Francisco?

The room is a corner unit with one of those bay windows. I sat and watched late night traffic and ne’er-do-wells on the street. In the building across the street there was a late night house party of some kind. It wasn’t a teenage rager, but some adults doing adult things, milling around the apartment with a drink in hand.

I’m here to go to the DeYoung museum and to see the Tamara de Lempickaretrospective. The show closes in February and now is my chance. My tickets are for 10am. There is a small coffee shop around the corner. I plan to have a lingering breakfast, go see the painted ladies, then make my way to the DeYoung.

I found breakfast a little coffee shop called “Alamo Square Café” which opened at 8. The signs and the internet said they open at 7:30. The Alamo Café is a local place and everyone but me knew the staff. I sipped coffee and ate a bagel sandwich while typing on my iPad. Immediately across from me a man roughly my age had his laptop on a stand with a split ergonomic keyboard and a mouse. Soulmates.

I hopped a bus to the museum as a novelty. Look at me! I’m on a bus! I made my way to the museum, flashed my virtual ticket, dropped my bag and coat at the coat check, grabbed an audio guide, and entered the exhibit.

The exhibition opens on a large, glamorous photo of de Lempicka surrounded by some of her early academic work (mostly pencil studies) and an unfinished portrait posthumously titled “Russian Dancer”. In this portrait the face is nearly complete in that clean, smooth style that de Lempicka is famous for. Parts of the portrait are roughly blocked in with transparent color. Around the hand and sleeve you can see her strong, geometric line work.

I love unfinished paintings. I love to see the bones, to see how the painting was put together. In this painting you can see de Lempicka relies on very little underdrawing. This reveals her confidence in her ability to see and understand the forms in front of her and capture them reliably. She’s not using tools like a grid or sight lines, just a few spare painted strokes to delineate the figure.

I’ve been a quiet fan of de Lempicka since I was a kid in art school. Once, in Las Vegas casino, I thought I saw a de Lempicka hanging in a stairwell. I remember asking a rough looking man in a suit and name tag if I could take a photo. He said “knock yourself out”. In retrospect, it was probably a poster in a nice frame. I might have seen one real painting of hers in a museum in New York once. Maybe.

This retrospective is the first of its kind in the United States. I’m lucky to have the time and means to come and see it. The show features a collection of De Lempicka’s most famous paintings, some sketches and studies,a few comparative samples of work by her teacher André Lhote, all alongside flapper dresses, evening gowns, ceramics, and yellowed copies of Vogue and Vanity Fair to set the mood.

Her jazz-age cubism renders her subjects in machined perfection. Her figures are constructed with geometry. Nudes are formed like steel auto parts. Ringlets of hair are copper shavings glinting in the light. Eyes are inset glass. The surfaces of her paintings are impossibly smooth with no visible brushstrokes. Her lines are clean, her edges are sharp. This might sound cold, but her work radiates eros. There’s a heaving, warm life to her figures that defies the method by which they are painted. That tension makes the work sing. There is a cliche in painting that big sloppy brushstrokes represent big strong feelings. When you see the maintained passion of de Lempicka’s work, you quickly understand that big sloppy brushstrokes are kitsch.

Many of her portraits were commissioned by Very Important People. But the others are lovers, sex workers, husbands, and ex husbands. De Lempicka’s love life was far reaching and epic. She paints her female lovers as strong and confident with squared shoulders, making direct eye contact, but still feminine. Her men are demure, almost coquettish, leaning at relaxed angles, inviting, but still masculine. De Lempicka doesn’t subvert gender roles, but broadens them. Her women and men contain multitudes.

De Lempicka lived a glamours life, finding herself in Vogue magazine (on the cover as an illustration, and between the pages). She navigated the world of celebrity expertly and used it to build a career as an artist. Wall text in the gallery and voice-over in the audio guide tried to make comparisons to Instagram influencers. That’s not wrong but it seems, to me, to diminish what she accomplished. Instagram influencers are over first of all, but more importantly, they don’t produce anything of lasting value. They are disposable and interchangeable. De Lempicka wielded celebrity to create great works of art.