Elle - USA (2019-06)

CULTURE ART & DESIGN

O

LUCHITA HURTADO painted in

relative obscurity for most of her life.

At 98, she’s finally receiving the

recognition she deserves. By Chris Wiley

NATIONAL

TREASURE

ne of the first things Luchita Hurtado does when

we sit down together at a sunny sidewalk café near

her apartment in Santa Monica is announce her

age: “I’m 98 and still having fun!” Two years shy

of a century, she has just mounted her first New York solo

exhibition at the venerable Hauser & Wirth gallery, and is

gearing up for a traveling survey that opens at the Serpen-

tine Sackler Gallery in London on May 23. It’s a stunning

achievement for an artist of any age, but Hurtado’s situation

is unique—just three years ago, the paintings that will now

be touring the world were hidden away in a cramped storage

room, gathering dust.

They first came to light through the efforts of Ryan Good,

studio estate manager of Hurtado’s late husband, the artist

Lee Mullican. While doing a deep dive into Mullican’s ar-

chives, Good found works that seemed as if they didn’t be-

long. There were surreal drawings of twisted, totemic figures;

monumental abstract canvases, sutured together in strips;

nude self-portraits, rendered from the artist’s perspective,

looking down, so that the body became a kind of landscape.

Hurtado loves to tell the story of Good coming to her to ask

about the enigmatic signature, L.H. (at the time, she was going

by Luchita Mullican). “I looked at him and said, ‘That’s me!’”

Good began showing Hurtado’s art to friends and gallerists,

and in 2016, Hurtado had a solo show at an L.A. apartment

gallery, her first exhibit since the 1970s. Things snowballed

from there. In 2018, she was dubbed a “breakout star” of the

Hammer Museum’s Made in L. A. show by multiple outlets.

Born in the small Venezuelan coastal city of Maiquetía in

1920, Hurtado moved to New York with her mother when she was eight years old.

Hurtado began studying art on the sly, defying her mother’s wishes to follow in her

footsteps as a seamstress. “My family wasn’t very proud of me,” Hurtado recalls. “They

couldn’t understand what I was talking about half the time. They were never inter-

ested in what my life was.”

Soon after graduating from high school, Hurtado married Chilean journalist Daniel

del Solar, with whom she had two children. Six years later, Del Solar abandoned her.

Hurtado went to work, earning a living as a window designer and fashion illustrator.

Wherever she went, from New York to Mexico City to San Francisco to Los Angeles,

she seemed to land on the cutting edge of contemporary culture. She threw a children’s

birthday party with Frida Kahlo, sat for a portrait by Man Ray, and had martini lunches

with Agnes Martin. She led séances (until they got too “creepy”) and swashbuckled

through the jungle on archaeological expeditions alongside her second husband,

Wolfgang Paalen, whom she describes as an “intellectual pirate.” She was thrust into

the orbit of a dictator (Rafael Trujillo, of the Dominican Republic, whose brother’s

romantic interest in her forced her to flee the country) and designed her own clothes

(Salvador Dalí declared them fabulous). She also faced the death of her son Pablo at

age six from polio; was subsequently divorced from Paalen and remarried to Mullican;

and gave birth to two more children. All the while, she la-

bored on her art almost completely out of the public eye.

“I never stopped,” Hurtado says. “And I was cooking

all the time, you know, and washing dishes, changing

diapers. But still making art. I would work at midnight.”

It’s tempting to say that her perseverance has finally

paid off, but she maintains that making art was “like my

diary,” and that she never thought much about a career.

Nevertheless, Rebecca Lewin, who is co-curating Hurta-

do’s survey at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery with Hans

Ulrich Obrist, likened the process of trawling through her

vast and variegated archives to “opening a treasure chest.”

Hurtado has relished the ride, greeting her accolades

with a mixture of pride and childlike glee. Recently, she

stopped by her Hauser & Wirth show in New York and

ran into a group of students. “They clapped!” she says. “It

was amazing.” When asked what she did upon receiving

such a welcome, she laughs loudly: “I clapped back!”

ABOVE: HURTADO IN HER SANTA MONICA STUDIO.

RIGHT: HURTADO’S OIL PAINTING UNTITLED, FROM 1975.

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