Introducing Tamara de Lempicka: Art Deco Diva

Recognized as the leading figure of Art Deco painting, Tamara de Lempicka (1894-1980) captured the vitality and glamour of postwar Paris and the cosmopolitan sheen of Hollywood celebrity. With her stylish portraits of European and American jet-set and her female nudes, Lempicka took Paris by storm. Her work exudes a unique combination of cool elegance and transgressive sensuality that made her life legendary. This lecture by Dr. Furio Rinaldi, Curator in Charge of works on paper at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, is presented in conjunction with the landmark retrospective on Lempicka he curated and is currently on view at the deYoung. As the first museum exhibition on Lempicka held in the United States, the exhibition sheds a light on previously unknown aspects of her mysterious biography and aims to reassess her role within the development of the international Modernism. 

Dr. Furio Rinaldi is Curator in charge at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, the Fine Arts Musuems of San Francisco’s department of works on paper (prints, drawings, and photographs). For the museums, he curated the popular and critically acclaimed exhibitions Botticelli Drawings (Legion of Honor, 2023-24, the exhibition catalogue named as one the best art books of the year by The New York Times) and Color into Line: Pastels from the Renaissance to the Present (2021). An expert of Renaissance drawings, in 2022 he was appointed Julie and David Tobey Fellow by the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.  

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) are comprised of two iconic sites in San Francisco’s beautiful parks- the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park and Legion of Honor Museum in Lincoln Park. As the largest public arts institution in the western United States, the Museums house a world-class collection of 151,000 artworks that span more than 5,000 years.  
 

The JCCSF and FAMSF have collaborated for over a decade, and we are grateful that FAMSF graciously shares the beauty and history of their collections with the community through inspiring educational docent talks.