Luchita Hurtado
Venezuelan artist whose talent was discovered late after a life filled with romance and adventure
LUCHITA HURTADO, who has died aged 99, was a Venezuelan painter whose talents were only discovered by the art world when she was in her 90s; she became a media sensation, depicted as a woman held back for decades by sexism.
But her life before she became art-world news was full of incident. Among other things she had escaped the amorous advances of the Dominican dictator Héctor Trujillo, flown a plane over a jungle and watched the Mexican painter Diego Rivera shoot a bullet into a piñata at a children’s party.
She was friends with the De Koonings, Chagall, Léger, and Marcel Duchamp, who gave her a foot massage. She was photographed by Man Ray, drawn by Don Bachardy, propositioned by Luis Buñuel, swapped gossip with the surrealist Leonora Carrington (who built a house from cardboard for her children), and partied with Frida Kahlo.
She had many lovers and three husbands, and it was some time after the death of the third of these, the Californian artist Lee Mullican, in 1998 that a large number of works, many featuring naked women and signed “LH”, were found mixed up in his portfolios.
Their origin was a mystery. Luchita was generally known by her husband’s surname and no one could think of an artist whose surname began with an H. Nor did it occur to anyone that the nude drawings and paintings might be self-portraits.
When curators came to look at what Luchita Hurtado called the “I am” pictures – in which the female form is seen in a foreshortened, almost abstract, perspective – the bodies were assumed to belong at the top of the frame, opposite the viewer, as if they were the object of a male gaze. In fact the bodies were supposed to go at the bottom of the frame – the perspective of a female artist looking down at herself.
After she revealed herself as the mysterious “LH”, in 2016 a show of Luchita Hurtado’s works at a small gallery in Los Angeles caused a sensation and in 2018, when she was featured at the “Made in LA” biennial at the city’s Hammer Museum, she was described in The New York Times as one of its “hands-down stars”.
Taken on by Hauser & Wirth, she featured in Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people and in 2019 she had her first museum retrospective, at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
Luchita Hurtado never minded the obscurity that had been her lot over so many decades, even when egged on by feminists outraged on her behalf. Asked whether she wished recognition had come sooner, she replied: “No, it wasn’t the right time sooner.”
Born Luisa Amelia García Rodriguez on October 28 1920 at Maiquetía, a small coastal town in Venezuela, she emigrated with her mother and sister to New York when she eight years old, while her father stayed in Venezuela. She would take her grandmother’s name Hurtado just for her paintings.
At 18 she married Daniel de Solar, a Spanish journalist twice her age, and gave birth to the first of their two sons on the day the Germans invaded Paris.
But in 1944 Solar walked out on the marriage, and soon after she met the Austrian surrealist Wolfgang Paalen, who took her to Mexico in 1946.
In 1948, however, her five-year-old younger son Pablo contracted polio and died. As a result, Luchita temporarily went blind and, unable to bear living any more in Mexico, in 1949 the family returned to the US.
The marriage to Paalen soon broke down and in 1957 she married Paalen’s friend Lee Mullican, with whom she had two more sons. Luchita Hurtado had studied painting at school, and made a living as an illustrator and muralist, but she made her first “proper” painting in secret only after her first marriage collapsed in the 1940s. It was of a black stove with blue lights. She showed the odd picture in group shows, but it was only when her work was discovered much later that the full range of her talents emerged.
Her portfolio demonstrated an extraordinary variety of styles, ranging from small figurative oil paintings, ink sketches and life drawings to giant striped geometric canvases and all-white paintings.
“There were hyperrealist Magritte-like skies with feathers floating in them. There were Matisse-like paintings depicting sex, and Rouault-like others depicting birth,” The Telegraph’s Gaby Wood recalled of a visit to an LA warehouse containing about 1,000 pieces.
“There were long paintings that looked like strips of celluloid or calligraphic scrolls. Some, ecological proclamations, were very new. Hurtado’s capacity for creation seemed infinite.”
Much critical interest focused on her “Yo Soy” (“I am”) drawings and paintings, on which she had embarked when she found her husband had been having an affair. “He said, ‘You’ve been married twice, you have had an affair. You’ve been very free about living your life here. And I … you were the first person.’ And I understood,” Luchita Hurtado explained. “I said he should have other affairs, and it hurt me every time he did. It was painful.”
Her intimate selfportraits, done without a mirror and mostly consisting of views as she looked down over her breasts and stomach to her feet and the floor, were produced in confined spaces – an eloquent metaphor, some felt, for her status in a marriage in which the work of her husband, as The Guardian’s Adrian Searle noted, “took up most of the physical and mental space”.
Luchita Hurtado is survived by two sons from her marriage to Lee Mullican. Her eldest son, from her marriage to Daniel de Solar, died in 2012.
Luchita Hurtado, born October 28 1920, died August 13 2020