Retrospective: Queen of Deco

Tamara de Lempicka at Westwood Gallery
Edith Newhall, New York Magazine, 12 Dec 1995
Few believe that Tamara de Lempicka, whose paintings of the twenties through the fifties are the subject of a recently opened survey at the Westwood Gallery, was a great artist. Even her best paintings have a flat, graphic quality and their subject matter is often hilariously campy. More likely, the continuing vogue for De Lempicka’s paintings has to do with those Hollywood celebrities who clamber after them (Barbara Streisand, Jack Nicholson, Madonna), never mind the behemoth prices they’ve fetched at auction–the record is held by Christie’s for its 1994 $1.8 million sale of Streisand’s Adam and Eve (1992).