(Image via Tamara de Lempicka Estate)
The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & the Art of Survival from director Julie Rubio just had its world premiere on October 11 at the Mill Valley Film Festival October 11 in advance of what the filmmaker hopes will be a wider availability on a streamer.
The film is not lavish and stylized and artful like its subject, one of the most important painters of the 20th century, but what it has going for it is an unabashed curiosity not about her sensational personal life but her artistry — and her tenacity.
Taking this tack, the doc is inherently feminist, but not in a superficial, girl-power way, in an unapologetically academic way. Her life and oeuvre are dissected in minute detail via lively interviewrs with experts and even her direct descendants, with an accent on de Lempicka's dramatically modern viewpoint.
What would shock us today from an artist? What is left? It is hard to imagine, but exciting to learn more about a woman who accomplished many firsts just 100 years ago, including being a rare woman artist capturing female nudes, and portraying female sensuality and eroticism.
The True Story of Tamara de Lempicka & the Art of Survival is especially helpful in its inclusion of a wealth of her original sketches and paintings, not just the famous ones.
The more recent aspects of the artist's fame — her co-opting by Madonna, Barbra Streisand's ownership of her work, her record-setting auction sales — provide the denouement, which makes an excellent case for the belief that this artist is, to this day, shamefully underrepresented in major U.S. museums. It's a shame the recent Broadway musical failed, as it makes one wonder when her time will truly come.
Watch the trailer: