Furio Rinaldi, curator of drawings and prints at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and specialist in Italian drawings, discusses Tamara de Lempicka. He explores her mix of Renaissance technique and art-deco sheen. Short scenes cover her modern-woman persona, bold reinventions of traditional subjects, iconic portraits like Woman in Green, and the rise, reinvention, and legacy of her glamorous career.
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insights INSIGHT
Classical Technique Meets Modernity
Tamara de Lempicka fused classical lineage with modern industrial aesthetics to create a unique style.
Furio Rinaldi emphasizes her deliberate blend of anatomy, linearity, and modernity as central to her originality.
question_answer ANECDOTE
First Encounter In Rome
Rinaldi first encountered Lempicka at a 1994 Rome exhibition that made a strong personal impression.
That childhood memory shaped his lasting interest and linked Lempicka to the Italian Renaissance tradition.
insights INSIGHT
Woman In Green As Manifesto
Rinaldi highlights Woman in Green as emblematic: sculptural drapery, poised self-fashioning, and assertive modern femininity.
He reads the painting as both fashion statement and a declaration of self-assurance.
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I am so excited to say that my guest on the great women artists podcast is the renowned curator, scholar, and expert in 15th- and 16th-century Italian drawings, Furio Rinaldi to discuss TAMARA DE LEMPICKA!
Dubbed “the Baroness with the Brush'', Lempicka at the height of the 1920s found herself at the centre of Parisian life, and constructed some of the most radical, liberal and avant-garde images. From reworking traditional subjects to melding the meticulous techniques of Renaissance painting with cold and shiny art-deco aesthetics to evoke the fast-industrialising world.
Born in Poland at the end of the 19th century, Lempicka was raised in Russia, but escaped at the outbreak of the revolution. From there, she settled in Paris: the centre of the avant-garde, and thrived. She painted celebrated characters in the highest fashions of the day, and embraced sexual liberations.
Epitomising the modern woman, she was apparently known to break only for “baths and champagne”, this was, of course in her modernist apartment-slash-studio, designed by her equally successful sister, Adrienne Górska.
Currently holding the post of Curator of drawings and prints at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the largest collection of works on paper in Western United States – where he has just staged the most extraordinary Botticelli exhibition – Furio is acclaimed for his work on Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo.
A writer – he has published extensively in The Burlington Magazine, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal and more, but perhaps he is best known for his curatorial eye, having organised the fantastic Legion of Honor exhibition Color into Line: Pastel from the Renaissance to the Present, and next year, will curate a groundbreaking exhibition – and the first major show on the West Coast – on the Polish-born painter Tamara de Lempicka – who is very excitingly the artists we will be discussing today.
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