Luchita Hurtado Venezuela - US, 1920-2020
"Luchita Hurtado [was] an artist whose paintings and drawings emphasized the interconnectedness of all living things with a visionary intensity that was almost shamanic, but whose work was recognized by the art world only late in her life."
- Karen Rosenberg, The New York Times
A near-contemporary and friend of Frida Kahlo, Isamu Noguchi and Agnes Martin, among other prominent modern artists, the Venezuelan-born Ms. Hurtado was an active participant in the art scenes of New York, Mexico City, Taos, N.M., and Los Angeles.
Her work spanned Surrealism, Mexican muralism, feminism and environmentalism, and she was associated with Dynaton, a group of mystically minded abstract artists, among them her second husband, the Austrian-Mexican Wolfgang Paalen, and her third husband, the American Lee Mullican. Yet her art was rarely exhibited until the 1970s, and then only sporadically and in small venues until she was in her 90s, when Mr. Mullican’s studio manager came across a vast archive of her paintings and drawings.
Working in graphite, watercolor, ink and acrylic, Ms. Hurtado depicted bodies — her own, as well as totemic figures — merging with landscapes and interiors in electric expressions of rootedness and communality. She sought out diverse sources of inspiration, including ancient traditions — cave paintings at Lascaux, France; Olmec heads in La Venta, Mexico; tribal dances in Taos — as well as mid-20th-century schools of abstraction.
Luchita Hurtado was born on Nov. 28, 1920, in Maiquetía, a Venezuelan coastal city about 15 miles north of Caracas. At age 8 she emigrated to New York, where she lived with her mother, a seamstress, her sister and two aunts; her father remained behind in Venezuela.
She studied fine art at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan and, after graduating, volunteered at the Spanish-language newspaper La Prensa. There she met Daniel del Solar, a much older journalist, and, at age 18, married him. During their brief, peripatetic union, she was introduced to other creative expatriates and intellectuals, among them Mr. Noguchi, the Mexican abstract painter Rufino Tamayo, and the Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta.
But her husband abandoned her and their children when the second of their two sons was still an infant. To support her family, she worked as a window dresser for the Lord & Taylor department store and as a freelance fashion illustrator for Condé Nast.
Ms. Hurtado took classes at the Art Students League and, with Mr. Noguchi and other friends, made the rounds of influential galleries, including Betty Parsons and Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century. It was through Mr. Noguchi that she met Mr. Paalen.
Ms. Hurtado joined him in Mexico City in the mid-1940s and became part of a close-knit art community there in which Mexican muralists, American photographers and European Surrealists who had fled World War II mingled freely. The couple lived in the same neighborhood as Kahlo and her husband, the painter Diego Rivera, and socialized with Leonora Carrington, the British painter and dream chronicler. They traveled throughout Mexico collecting pre-Columbian art, the influence of which can be seen in Ms. Hurtado’s paintings from this period.
The marriage began to unravel after Ms. Hurtado’s son Pablo, from her first marriage, died of polio. Grief-stricken, she wanted to have another child; her husband did not. Seeking a change of environment, the couple moved to Mill Valley, Calif., in 1949. There, Ms. Hurtado reconnected with Mr. Mullican, who, like Mr. Paalen, was a proponent of Dynaton, a movement informed by automatism, mysticism and indigenous art and named after the Greek word for “possible.”
She moved to Los Angeles in 1951 and remained there until the end of her life, with frequent forays to a second home in Taos. She and Mr. Mullican married later in the 1950s. She raised two sons with him and supported his career, working on her own art at night when everyone else was asleep.
Through all her relocations and relationships, making art was a constant — “a need, like brushing your teeth".. Yet her dedication and productivity were not recognized until the 1970s, when she began to participate in consciousness-raising circles and was included in group exhibitions with a feminist angle; one of them, “Invisible/Visible,” at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1972, was organized by the artists Judy Chicago and Dextra Frankel.
Outside Los Angeles, however, she remained largely unknown until 2015, when, while working for the estate of Mr. Mullican (who died in 1998), his former studio director, Ryan Good, uncovered a trove of paintings and works on paper marked only with the initials “L.H.” He consulted Ms. Hurtado, who was then using the name Luchita Mullican, and found to his surprise that the work was hers.
Mr. Good set about finding a dealer to show her art; an exhibition at the Park View Gallery in Los Angeles followed in 2016, as did enthusiastic reviews. Christopher Knight, The Los Angeles Times’s art critic, praised the "salutary visual grit" of Ms. Hurtado’s works on paper.
Exhibitions in New York and London ensued.