This pioneering female artist’s Jewish heritage is no longer a secret — but what about the rest of her life?

Elusive pop-culture figures make for appealing stories, but at the same time, their elusiveness and secrecy can make their stories hard to tell. This paradox is evident in The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & the Art of Survival, a new documentary from Julie Rubio, about the trailblazing – though oft-forgotten – artist during Paris’ interwar period.

Born to Jewish parents who converted to Catholicism, Tamara Rosa Hurwitz married prominent Polish lawyer Tadeusz Łempicki and adopted the feminine version of his last name, Łempicka. They lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, until the Russian Revolution of 1917 forced them to flee the country. The couple moved to Paris, where Łempicka studied under painters Maurice Denis and André Lhote, both important figures in the emerging styles of cubism and fauvism.

According to art historians, Łempicka was among the first artists to draw nude women through the female gaze. The provocative way she portrayed the female form was considered scandalous at the time. One critic called her a “perverse Ingres,” referring to the male Neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, famous for his female nudes. Still, her unique style made her one of the most sought-after portrait painters for the Parisian elite. Her life and career were the subject of a Broadway musical that ran for 41 performances in the spring of 2024.

Rubio, best known for producing the culinary dramedy East Side Sushi, attempts to tell Łempicka’s life story in Art of Survival. The film, which beautifully showcases many of her works, will surely be of interest to art history buffs. It effectively conveys the groundbreaking nature of her style and her struggle for recognition in a male-dominated field.

But the movie rarely gets past the surface of Łempicka’s character. It only touches on her personal life – the influential relationship she had as a child with her grandmother, her failed first marriage, her bisexuality.

The film explains that Łempicka purposefully crafted a mysterious public persona – as a woman in a patriarchal society, it was important to maintain an imposing, untouchable image. This may be part of the reason the movie doesn’t go into much detail on who de Łempicka was outside of her work. But Art of Survival also skims over well-known facts about the artist; although the film underscores her depression after her first husband left her, it brushes past the context of her well-documented infidelity during this marriage – notably with icons of Paris’ queer underground.

In fact, it feels like Łempicka’s involvement in Parisian queer life and her bisexuality are never given quite enough attention. Being a queer woman in the early 20th century surely came with its complications. Did her husband know about her queerness? Did her daughter? Did the public? How did she find these queer communities in the first place?

This lack of thorough investigation into her personal life may have been intentional – the film argues that if Łempicka were a man, modern audiences would not be as obsessed with her personal life as they seem to be with Łempicka’s.

That argument feels flimsy. If Łempicka were a bisexual male from the early 20th century who threw wild parties – which historians believe were intended to get more people to see her work – I think audiences would be just as interested in that part of her life.

The film does dig into the artist’s secret Jewish heritage. For years, it was believed that Łempicka’s family name was Gurwik-Gorski, as it appears on many historical records. It was only recently discovered that her original surname was Hurwitz. When the family name was changed is unclear, but it is known that her parents Boris and Malwina Hurwitz converted to Catholicism in 1891 and had Łempicka baptized in 1897, at the age of three.

The film argues that this secret heritage was a burden in Łempicka’s life, especially as the Nazi party rose to power in Germany and began to encroach on the rest of Europe. The prominence of Catholic iconography in many of her paintings, such as The Mother Superior (1935) and La Polonaise (1933), is believed by historical experts to be an attempt to pass herself as a pure Catholic.

Whether or not this would have been an effective defense against Nazi persecution is irrelevant – her second husband, Baron Raoul Kuffner de Diószegh, was Jewish and the couple fled to the United States in 1939.

All these elements of secrecy and escape are perfect for a gripping drama. But without a fully-developed protagonist, the film falls flat. There’s also not quite enough engaging content for a 100-minute film and in the end the material feels stretched too thin.

This film’s mission is to make more people aware of the art icon, often overlooked because of her gender and controversial lifestyle. And while more people should know the name Tamara de Łempicka, the film doesn’t really get us any closer to solving the mystery of who she was as a person.

The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & the Art of Survival is playing at the New York Jewish Film Festival, January 28, at 3:00pm and 8:30pm.

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