The True Story of Tamara De Lempicka & The Art of Survival digs beneath Art Deco painter’s glossy surfaces

Julie Rubio’s extensive new documentary, making its local debut at the VIFF Centre, reveals a trailblazing woman who was an outsider on several counts

By Janet Smith

Julie Rubio, director of The True Story of Tamara De Lempicka & The Art of Survival, with Autoportrait (Tamara in a Green Bugatti).

Tamara De Lempicka, painting a portrait of departed husband Tadeusz in 1929, from The True Story of Tamara De Lempicka & The Art of Survival.

The True Story of Tamara De Lempicka & The Art of Survival screens at the VIFF Centre from May 23 to 31

IN TAMARA DE LEMPICKA’S most famous paintings from the 1920s, women with finger-wave curls and blunt flapper bobs wear gorgeously draped silk gowns, chic gloves, and sculptural hats. Instantly summoning the Art Deco era, her images are iconic.

But as a thorough new documentary about her life shows, these paintings were deeper than fashion or surface beauty. And there’s much more to the women she depicted than initially meets the eye. They’re sexually self-assured. Their gazes suggest a complexity, a defiance, or—as in her most famous self-portrait, behind the wheel of an emerald-green Bugatti—an iciness. Like the artist herself, the subjects are empowered, independent, and larger-than-life, often standing tall against the era’s new skyscrapers.

“I wanted to take away the superficialness that people thought about her, and really make people understand that there was so much more to this woman, that she was so much more exceptional,” says filmmaker Julie Rubio, speaking to Stir from California ahead of the Vancouver premiere of her film The True Story of Tamara De Lempicka & The Art of Survival at VIFF Centre this week. “Her story is one of figuring out where you can find your peace, and figuring out where you can find the beauty, because it can get really ugly out there. And she really figured out how to make things beautiful. You’re just sitting there going, ‘How’d she do that?’ Well, she had to survive.”

The True Story of Tamara De Lempicka & The Art of Survival digs behind those glossy surfaces to reveal a woman who was an outsider on several counts: as a female artist; as a bisexual; and, as the film uncovers, as a Jewish person whose family converted to conceal their identities. (Recent research has confirmed De Lempicka was born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz in 1894.) Drawing on interviews with art historians and De Lempicka’s descendants, as well as archival footage and research, Rubio follows the artist as she escapes the Russian Revolution as a young bride and establishes herself as a trailblazing painter during Paris’s jazz age. Tellingly, she at first signs her paintings “Lempitzky”, the masculine version of her last name, to obscure her female identity in a male-dominated field. In the 1930s, she flees with her second, Jewish husband and her daughter Kizette to America. The film tracks the artist right to her death in 1980 in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she spent her final years.

Through a wealth of Lempicka’s paintings, we see her develop her style—melding a love of Renaissance classics with cubism, and breaking new ground as a woman painting sensual nudes whose skin positively glows. Looking Garbo-cool in her tilted hats and diamond bracelets, De Lempicka brands herself with a glamorous mystique that foreshadows the social-media celebrities of today. And along the way, she leaves a trail of lovers of both sexes—many of whom she painted—and empty champagne glasses.

“The partying, the cheating: she definitely behaved more like a man than she did a woman. Or maybe she behaved exactly like a woman, but that a woman would have to hide,” Rubio says. “You know, she was sensationalized, and she was oversexualized, and then there was ageism and anti-Semitism. She had so much against her, she had so much to hide. And it really shows where we are today, unfortunately, with these things happening again.

“We’re not listening to all the voices in the room,” Rubio continues. “And there’s so many women in our past that have so much to tell us that they give us a whole road map of how to survive—and to do it with grace and enjoy it and thrive.”

“Lempicka cracked that door open for me, because she did paint so many women that she had affairs with and that she had long-term relationships with.”

Rubio had her first encounter with De Lempicka’s work almost 20 years ago. It led to her own awakening, specifically after viewing the painting Portrait of Ira P., a sultry image of the artist’s lover Ira Perrot, swathed in clinging white satin to match her bouquet of lilies. That day, a friend told Rubio that De Lempicka had been bisexual—and Rubio, who’d had girlfriends in the past, realized she might be too.

“I’d grown up in a small town, and was always told you’re either gay or straight. But I knew that I had been in love with women before, and I was just always told that that was just kind of, you’re playing around, you know, you’re dabbling,” she says. “So I never took that seriously, because I was always told that it was nothing. And Lempicka cracked that door open for me, because she did paint so many women that she had affairs with and that she had long-term relationships with. I think that representation and seeing that helped me to understand that nothing was wrong with me, and that love is love, you know?”

At first, the director of films like the award-winning East Side Sushi had wanted to make a dramatized version of the artist’s story. But when the pandemic hit, she decided to pursue a documentary instead. “It was really brilliant to be stuck in lockdown with her,” she says.

In all, the documentary took almost five years to come to fruition—almost 20 if you count Rubio’s attempts at a dramatic film—but its timing could not have been better. De Lempicka has always been popular, collected by everyone from Barbra Streisand to Madonna. But this year has seen a spotlight on De Lempicka’s paintings like never before, with a major retrospective at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and a new Broadway musical about her life. In the past few years, her paintings have been taking millions at auctions: the most was for 1932’s Portrait of Marjorie Ferry, of a jazz-era Parisian cabaret singer, which earned $21.1 million at Christie’s, smashing the artist’s own record. De Lempicka is now the world’s third-most expensive female artist. This year also marks the centenary of Art Deco, Rubio points out. It makes sense, then, that Rubio is screening the film everywhere from Australia to Hungary.  

But the timing is also good for a reminder that we don’t have to fit into a society increasingly focused on putting people in boxes—or ever play it safe to succeed. As the artist herself once said, as quoted in the documentary, “I live life in the margins of society and the rules of normal society don’t apply to those who live on the fringe.”

“She does make one think about the fact that we are brainwashed to really believe that life is this one thing, this one lens, and that we have to live it this exact way and play by the rules of this exact kind of story,” Rubio reflects. “That was said to her from a very young age and she kind of blew that all up. It makes you think that maybe there’s another way. Maybe there’s more to life.” 

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