Art Deco’s Bad Girl, Still Ahead of Her Time

Before Madonna strapped on her funnel-breasted bustier and called it feminism, there was the painter Tamara de Lempicka.

Her portraits of sculptural women and icy, querying aristocrats between the World Wars have become synonymous with the fierceness and decadence of Paris in the 1920s, when she found her first fame. Inheriting the last of Cubism, Lempicka developed a distinctive geometric realism that, despite its spot-welded austerity on the canvas, breathed jolts of humanity into her subjects, like the Tin Man’s achievement of a heart.

Barbra Streisand collected her in the 1970s. By the late ’80s, Madonna was quoting Lempicka’s sleek eroticism in her music videos and look. This spring, the Broadway musical “Lempicka” cast her as a feminist prophet singing lines like: “I created for myself something that the world had never seen. I painted what a woman could be.” (The musical closed after only 41 performances.)

A little worn out by now, this reputation of Lempicka the Liberator is both refreshed and challenged in “Tamara de Lempicka” at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the painter’s first major survey in the United States.

The show was curated by Gioia Mori, a Lempicka scholar, and Furio Rinaldi, a curator at the de Young. By turns swaggering, Sapphic and sensational, the 100 paintings and drawings deliver every inch of Lempicka’s luxuriant rigor, and they show us where the life pumps through it all.