Luchita Hurtado, belatedly acclaimed for the sensual beauty of her art, dies

Luchita Hurtado, an artist who labored for decades in near-anonymity until her collection of works — vibrant, sensual paintings that invite viewers to gaze anew at the female body and to contemplate the nexus of human and all earthly life — received sudden international attention when she was in her 90s, died Aug. 13 at her home in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 99.

Luisa Amelia Garcia Rodriguez Hurtado was born Nov. 28, 1920, in Maiquetía, Venezuela, a coastal city near Caracas. Her death was confirmed by her gallery, Hauser & Wirth, which did not cite a specific cause.

Hurtado was the unusual artist, a writer for the Los Angeles Times once observed, who “lived at the center of the art world — yet also at its margins.”

Through her marriages, including to the surrealist painter Wolfgang Paalen and to Lee Mullican, a member of a surrealist movement known as Dynaton, she met and befriended such figures as the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, her husband, the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. She said that Marcel Duchamp, the conceptualist who reimagined a urinal as a work of art, once gave her a foot massage.

Unbeknown to many of her acquaintances, Hurtado was also a committed artist, working at the kitchen table after her children had gone to sleep, in a style that evolved to include elements of surrealism, abstract art, Indigenous motifs and portraiture. For many years, she would turn her works in progress to face the wall when anyone visited her workspace.

“I always felt shy of it. I didn’t feel comfortable with people looking at my work,” she told the New York Times last year. “There was a time when women really didn’t show their work.”

Hurtado had one solo exhibit, in Los Angeles in 1974, and presented her works in occasional group shows. But she remained largely undiscovered until 2015, when Ryan Good, a curator organizing Mullican’s estate, happened upon painting after painting signed with the initials “L.H.” Knowing Hurtado only as Luchita Mullican, he inquired who the artist might be.

“That’s me!” she replied. The next year, Park View Gallery in Los Angeles mounted an exhibition of her works from the 1940s and 1950s. In 2018, she was among the artists featured in the “Made in L.A.” biennial at the Hammer Museum.

In 2019, the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London presented what it described as her first solo exhibition in a public institution, titled “Luchita

Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn.” It later opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Time magazine ranked her among the 100 most influential people in 2019.

“I still don’t believe it, to tell you the truth,” Hurtado said on NBC’s “Today” show last year, reflecting on the fame that she never had imagined might come.

Her works ranged widely in their styles and themes, from modernist abstraction to paeans to the Earth amid the threat of climate change. But she received particular acclaim for her “I Am” series dating to the 1960s, which depicted female nudes from an orientation that some curators at first failed to understand.