Warsaw, Saint Petersburg, Paris, Beverly Hills, New York, Houston, Cuernavaca, followed by the volcano Popocatepetl as the place she chose for the disposition of her ashes … the Art Deco goddess Tamara de Lempicka (1894–1980) certainly got around. Her tempestuous liaison with Italy’s Fascist lion of symboliste letters Gabriele D’Annunzio inspired the Canadian dramatist John Krizanc’s immersive Tamara, the longest-running play in the history of Los Angeles. Her art, dominated by lissome pin-ups with bee-stung lips, upturned eyeballs like globes of rock crystal, and locks of hair like handfuls of wood shavings or magnetic tape, exudes the glamour that found its celluloid apotheosis in screen icons like Garbo and Dietrich. Ladies’ magazines (a frequent outlet for her work) knew Tamara as “the baroness with the brush,” but her cannily cultivated vogue did not survive her. With over one hundred works on display, this full-court-press retrospective—the artist’s first in this country—feels more like an exploded coffee-table book than a proper museum show. Lempicka adored the Renaissance mannerist Bronzino, whose self-consciously twisted poses and polished surfaces she emulated. But like cookie-cutter Madonnas from the studio of a very busy Old Master, her glamour girls wrapped in their more-varied couture like so many bonbons quickly cloy. Oddly enough, her rarer portraits of post-Proustian dandies strike more hypnotic because more distinctively individual notes. A double portrait of sisters in blue catches the eye first for the girls’ extravagant hair ribbons—and then for the their subliminal affinities to Balthus in one case and Botero on the other. Another beauty, carefully laid out like Snow White in her coffin, evokes Tamara’s weirder sister in art Frida Kahlo. —Matthew Gurewitsch