True Story of Tamara de Lempicka

With her distinctive high-gloss sensual nudes and cooly elegant portraits of high society during the Jazz Age, Polish-Jewish artist Tamara de Lempicka (1894-1980) helped define Art Deco style and the glamour and transgressive vitality of post WWI Paris.

A prodigious talent, Lempicka combined cubism, classicism, and surrealism to reinvent the female figure, not as object but as protagonist. Feminist, style icon, working mother and bisexual libertine, Lempicka embodied Art Deco’s spirit and portrayed women in boldly erotic terms that broke the male gaze.

After stunning the art world in the 1920s with her show-stopping work, Lempicka fled to the United States in 1940 amidst the rise of fascism in Europe. Julie Rubio’s film is a revealing account of a woman who defied the rules—as an artist, mother, and bisexual woman—and gained notoriety for her romantic liaisons with friends and models.

Beloved by art collectors the world over, including Barbra Streisand, Jack Nicholson and Madonna (who prominently featured Lempicka paintings in her “Vogue” and “Open Your Heart” videos), Tamara de Lempicka is the subject of a new Broadway musical, and a rising star in the art market, where one of her paintings recently sold for more than $21 million, the second highest amount ever paid for an artwork by a female painter. Narrated by Anjelica Huston and featuring newly discovered material including 8mm home movies, this new documentary examines Lempicka’s extraordinary life and the aesthetic power and political impact of her marvelous paintings.