LUCHITA HURTADO, 1920 – 2020
LUCHITA HURTADO, 1920 – 2020
Painter found overnight fame in her 90s
The tag accompanying several beguiling canvases of nude female forms listed the painter’s birth year as 1920. That couldn’t be right, the visitor said. That would have made the artist almost a century old.
As it turns out, the tag was correct. The paintings were by Luchita Hurtado, who was making her first appearance in a major contemporary art biennial — at the age of 97.
This, despite her myriad connections to the art world: Hurtado had been married to notable painters (Wolfgang Paalen and Lee Mullican), and she counted key 20th century figures such as Rufino Tamayo, Isamu Noguchi and Marcel Duchamp as friends.
“She very much has had the life of an artist,” exhibition co-curator Anne Ellegood said of Hurtado’s trajectory at the time. “But without an exhibition history.”
Hurtado, whose spirited life carried her from her native Venezuela to New York, Mexico and Los Angeles, died Thursday evening at her home in Santa Monica of natural causes. Her death was confirmed by a representative at her gallery, Hauser & Wirth. She was 99.
Her death comes just six months after the opening of her major career survey at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in February, “Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn.”
The story of Hurtado is, to some degree, the story of many women artists in the 20th century who subsumed their careers for the needs of others.
Art-making was often done not in a dedicated studio, but on a kitchen table. Painting hours coincided with children’s bedtimes. Over the course of her life, she created hundreds of works that experimented with Modernism, Indigenous pattern and the surreal, works united by her interest in prehistory and the environment, but exhibited them only sporadically and principally in group shows.
Late in life her body of work came to light, and she was greeted as an overnight success by the art world. An overnight success that was eight decades in the making.
Jennifer King, an associate curator of contemporary art at LACMA, who helped organize the L.A. installation of Hurtado’s survey, said that the narratives about Hurtado’s globe-trotting, bohemian life, combined with the late rediscovery of her work, can often overwhelm her artistic accomplishments.
“She was a very original artist,” King said. “She was a formal innovator. She was an incredible colorist.”
And while her work took on myriad forms over the decades — abstract paintings that focused on pattern and works that toyed with the nature and form of written words — it was all bound together by common themes: “the feeling of deep connection to the Earth and everything that has lived on it: people, animals and plants.”
Hurtado’s works straddled eras, styles and continents. Key among her works are paintings from the late 1960s and ’70s that rendered aspects of women’s bodies as surreal landscapes and others that featured the nude female form as viewed from a woman’s perspective, often hovering over bright, patterned rugs.
In a conversation with artist Andrea Bowers in Ursula magazine in 2019, Hurtado addressed the issue of her late recognition: “I don’t feel anger, I really don’t. I feel, you know: ‘How stupid of them.’ Maybe the people who were looking at what I was doing had no eye for the future and, therefore, no eye for the present.”
Luchita Hurtado was born Luisa Amelia Garcia Rodriguez Hurtado on Nov. 28, 1920, in Maiquetía, Venezuela, to a seamstress mother. When Hurtado was 8 years old, the family immigrated to New York City.
From her youngest years, she was drawn to art and the ways in which it intersected with nature.
In a conversation held at LACMA in February, she recalled noticing the pattern on a butterfly’s wings as a child. “I was drawing figures with the hand above the head and on the wings of this butterfly, there was this drawing that I thought I had originated,” she said. “Nature was way ahead of me.”
Shortly after graduating from Washington Irving High School, she married Chilean journalist Daniel del Solar — a marriage that was short-lived.
Del Solar introduced her to a world of intellectuals that would shape the course of her life and her career — such as the prominent Mexican painter Tamayo, who became a good friend.
It was through her various art world connections that she ultimately met her second husband, Austrian theorist and painter Paalen. On a whim, she accompanied Paalen to see newly uncovered Olmec heads at La Venta in Mexico.
“That was my first date with Paalen,” she said. “We married a week after we met. It was very impulsive.”
But Hurtado’s marriage to Paalen was not fated to last. Her son Pablo del Solar died unexpectedly after contracting polio, and his death produced a rift. Hurtado wanted to have more children; Paalen did not. Hurtado returned to the U.S. and ultimately settled in California.
It was in California where she would remain for the rest of her life — first in the Bay Area, then in Los Angeles. It was also in California where she would reconnect with Mullican — and marry for the last time. The pair remained together for 40 years until his death in 1998, and had two children: Matt Mullican, who is also an artist, and John Mullican, a film director.
Hurtado’s late-in-life fame came as the result of a small exhibition of her paintings at Park View Gallery in 2016, which then operated out of owner Paul Soto’s apartment.
The show emerged out of happy accident. The year prior, Ryan Good, director of Mullican’s estate, was cataloging Mullican’s estate and kept stumbling into paintings of totemic figures and abstract patterns that bore no resemblance to Mullican’s work and were signed simply “L.H.”
Hurtado, at the time, went by her married name, Luchita Mullican. When Good asked her who the mysterious “L.H.” might be, she responded brightly, “That’s me!”
A year later, Park View was showing works by Hurtado from the 1940s and ’50s — a show that received positive notice by Times art critic Christopher Knight.
“Hurtado’s work,” he wrote, “was multicultural before multicultural was cool.”
Hurtado is survived by her sons Matt and John, from her marriage to Mullican, as well as two grandchildren. Daniel del Solar, the surviving child from her first marriage, died in 2012.
