LUCHITA HURTADO
As she approaches her 99th birthday, and ahead of her first solo show in the UK, the painter reveals how her nomadic history has shaped decades of truly magical work
Luchita Hurtado may have been born in 1920, but she has no trouble getting to grips with 21st-century technology. When I dial her up on Skype for our video interview one Friday evening (I’m in London, she’s in Los Angeles), she greets me with a warm, open smile, apparently unflustered by the prospect of telling her life story to a stranger on a computer screen. She is dressed in the same lush, vivid colours that fill her canvases, and her face is beautifully made up to accentuate her striking features and strong, Frida Kahlo-esque brows. I have been warned to take care not to tire her out – she is, after all, soon to celebrate her 99th birthday – but there are no traces of exhaustion in the lively, sparkling eyes looking out at me today. At one point during our conversation, I ask her if she considers herself adventurous. ‘I think so,’ she responds thoughtfully. ‘They say you are if you’re a Sagittarius, like me – you have that wanderlust.’
Hurtado became accustomed to a peripatetic existence from a young age. Born to a seamstress in Venezuela, she was brought over to New York in 1928 and sent to the allgirls high school Washington Irving, where, disregarding her mother’s wish for her to learn sewing, she secretly took classes in fine art. She went on to attend the Art Students League of New York and might, perhaps, have pursued this interest further, had she not become involved in the anti-fascist movement and fallen in love with the Chilean journalist Daniel del Solar. They wed when she was just 18 and he fathered two sons with her, then abandoned them in 1944. ‘I married the wrong man,’ she says now, sounding regretful but not resentful. ‘He was the wrong man for the woman he left me for too – he did exactly the same thing to her.’
Hurtado supported her young family by producing fashion illustrations and department-store installations, while mixing in artistic circles that included the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who introduced her to her second husband, the painter and philosopher Wolfgang Paalen. ‘He was a very exciting man – an intellectual pirate,’ she says of Paalen. ‘We married [in 1947] and took off for the jungle of Chiapas, which was a great adventure.’ The time they spent in Mexico, exploring the ancient culture of the Olmecs and meeting pioneering surrealist artists such as Leonora Carrington, seems to have been a formative influence on Hurtado; many of her paintings bear traces of preColumbian iconography, particularly in the recurrent presence of a totemic dancing figure.
Captivating as Hurtado found their lifestyle, her relationship with Paalen was stymied by her grief at losing a child from her first marriage. ‘I had a terrible time after my younger son died,’ she says, her face suddenly crumpling with the weight of the memory. ‘Infantile paralysis, one of those cases. So sad.’ In 1949, unable to stand the prospect of remaining in Mexico, Hurtado moved with Paalen to Mill Valley, California, where they settled for several years, before eventually deciding to divorce. Paalen returned to Mexico, while Hurtado embarked on a relationship with the painter Lee Mullican. After six years together, he became her husband; they went on to have two more sons, Matt and John, and were to remain together until his death in 1998.
Romantically, their marriage was the happy ending Hurtado deserved, but it was a long time before she was to receive her due recognition as an artist. Even as a young woman eking out a living as a jobbing illustrator, Hurtado had always painted; she continued to do so while helping to promote Mullican’s career, but it never occurred to her to push for her own art to be exhibited. ‘My son Matt is an artist, my husband was an artist… it was no outstanding thing,’ she says modestly. ‘Nobody had really seen my stuff – it was just done because it was a daily thing I enjoyed doing.’ It was not until 2015 that the sheer breadth of her creative output came to light, thanks to a discovery by Mullican’s estate director Ryan Good. ‘Ryan was making an audit of Lee’s work and he said, “I see all these things with the initials LH”,’ recalls Hurtado. ‘I said, “That’s me”.’
Good succeeded in unearthing and cataloguing more than 1,200 pieces by Hurtado, which have since formed the basis of solo shows in Los Angeles, New York and London (her current retrospective at the Serpentine Galleries has proved so popular that its run has been extended). Spanning drawings, paintings, jewellery and clothing, her oeuvre does not belong to any single school or genre. The paintings certainly display some of the hallmarks of surrealism or South American magical realism – female bodies transmogrified into voluptuous-looking abstract forms colliding in colourful, dreamlike landscapes – yet Hurtado could equally be understood as a trailblazing feminist or an ecological activist. Indeed, it is the fate of our planet that preoccupies her today; Hurtado’s latest works are among the most urgent, and the most provocative, she has ever created. ‘I’m using big words like “air” and “water”,’ she tells me. ‘I’m shouting, I’m saying, “Watch it, because all this could disappear”. And it’s true – we are in danger. We have more than enough stuff to kill ourselves and everybody else, and we don’t pay attention.’
While anxious to play her part in safeguarding humanity’s future, Hurtado is wonderfully sanguine about her own. As she contemplates her 100th year, ‘adventure’ remains her watchword; she has no fear of what might await her around the corner. ‘I think death is just a border – I don’t believe this can be the end,’ she says. ‘You just see what’s next. I’m very curious about it.’ Meanwhile, she continues to go to her studio every morning and make the art she loves. ‘When I take to my bed, I suppose that’ll be it, but I haven’t done so yet,’ she says, flashing me another winning smile. Until then, ‘work isn’t work for me – it’s living. It’s part of being alive.’
‘Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn’ is at the Serpentine Galleries (www.serpentinegalleries.org) until 20 October. Join the curator Rebecca Lewin for a private tour of the exhibition on 4 October as part of Bazaar Art Week; to book, visit www.bazaarartweek.co.uk.