Painter who became art star late in life

Shortly after the Hammer Museum opened the doors on its “Made in L.A.” biennial in 2018, a visitor reached out to the museum to alert it to a mistake in one of the wall texts.

The tag accompanying several beguiling canvases of nude female forms, created from the perspective of a woman gazing down at her own naked body, 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: Ms. 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 Ms. Hurtado’s trajectory at the time. “But without an exhibition history.”

Ms. 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, Calif., 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 Ms. 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 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 — very 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.

Of the desire to make art, she once told curator and writer Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer: “It was a need, like brushing your teeth.”

Jennifer King, an associate curator of contemporary art at LACMA, who helped organize the L.A. installation of Ms. Hurtado’s survey, said that the narratives about Ms. Hurtado’s globetrotting bohemian life, combined with the late rediscovery of her work, can often overwhelm her artistic accomplishments.

“She was a very original artist,” Ms. 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.”

The LACMA show, which originated at London’s Serpentine Galleries last year, was given more expansive treatment in its L.A. location, featuring more than 120 works from different eras — including 70 that hadn’t been a part of the London show. (The exhibition was shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic but remains fully installed in the hopes that it might be able to reopen.)

Ms. Hurtado was a painter whose works straddled eras, styles and continents. Key among her works are a series of 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. They were paintings that novelist and critic Yxta Maya Murray, in Artforum, described as being “less about the pleasures and trajectories of her body than about its suspension in otherwise throwaway moments.”