Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Taos, New Mexico was a very special place to the artist Luchita Hurtado. Its powerful energy, the imposing beauty of its dominating sky and mountain ranges, and the living and ancestral presence of Indigenous people and their culture allowed her to deepen her poetic and spiritual perception that she and all life forms are interconnected. It was here that she found inspiration to explore and embrace the self as multiple, changing, and mysterious, like the rest of nature, and as part of nature. During a crucial period of her own life—from the mid-1960s to the 1970s, when she regularly visited Taos—she explored nature-centered insights about her autobiographical and transcendent identity in various series. In this brief essay, I will focus on her paintings from the mid-1960s through the 1970s in which she created self-portraits of her brown body: the striking I Am series of her clothed or unclothed torso as seen from above, looking downward; the rendering of her torso horizontally, as landscape; the abstraction of her torso in the Sky Skin series; paintings of her shadow; word paintings of words such as “yo” and “I”; and finally, her Moth Lights series, featuring mandala-like squares of luminous white, offset against surrounding soft waves of emanating color. Through considering these series, we can trace the eventual identification of the autobiographical “I” with something larger: “mountain and leopard,” that is, with the more instinctual, undomesticated, and mysterious self, and with the larger natural world, as interdependent parts.2 Luchita Hurtado was born Luisa Amelia García Rodríguez in Venezuela in 1920, immigrated to New York City at the age of eight to join her mother and aunts already living there, and died in 2020 in Santa Monica, California at nearly one hundred years of age.3 Although she first exhibited her work in 1953, and had a solo show in 1974, she participated in only five other exhibitions until her work was discovered among the paintings of her deceased husband, Lee Mullican, in 2015.4 Solo exhibitions followed in 2016 and 2017, and her work appeared in five group shows in 2018. A major solo exhibition, “I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn,” opened at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2019 and traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2020, and to the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City in 2020–2021. An exhibition catalog and a second important publication were dedicated to her work in 2019 and 2020, and she became the subject of numerous videotaped and published interviews.5 Although minimally exhibited and written about as an artist during most of her life, Hurtado identified as an artist throughout, and was immersed in a rich social world that included the great and lesser-known names in Surrealism, Mexican modernist art, and American Abstract Expressionism. She remained part of international and US artistic and intellectual circles throughout her life. Her first husband, Daniel del Solar, was a well-connected Chilean journalist twice her age whom she met during high school while volunteering at a Spanish-language newspaper in New York City and married in 1938. Through him, she met an important influence in her early work, the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, and her life-long friends, the sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) and his stepsister, the modern dancer, Ailes Gilmour (1912–1993). Her second and third husbands, the painters Wolfgang Paalen (1905–1959) and Lee Mullican (1919–1998), were active in advancing post-Surrealist art. Paalen was the creative and intellectual force behind the influential international magazine Dyn, and both Paalen and Mullican showed their paintings in the “Dynaton” exhibition of 1951 in San Francisco, with the British expatriate, Gordon Onslow Ford. Prior to the 1990s, and even after, interviewers routinely asked Hurtado mainly about the famous and better-known figures in her circles, including Paalen and Mullican. But like other women artists of the first half of the twentieth century, “rediscovered” well after their male peers and partners, Hurtado’s own aesthetics and artworks remain to be carefully studied. Seven decades of art-making invite us to think about her aesthetic formation and artistic kinship with other artists, what her artwork witnessed through the decades, what her artwork meant to her, what she hoped it might mean to those of us who viewed it, and her unique contribution to the twentieth and early twenty-first-century history of art. To what did her thoughts turn in old age as a woman living in patriarchal cultures, and as a Latina who navigated life in the US in the pre-Civil Rights era? In the space of this brief essay, we can at least begin to broach some of these questions and contextualize Hurtado’s aesthetic formation within her own generation. Hurtado was among those who came of age as artists in the 1940s and 1950s and who were influenced by the artistic and intellectual generation immediately preceding their own, which included the nomadic international and European expatriate communities of New York City, Mexico City, the San Francisco Bay area, and Los Angeles. Throughout the first two decades of her oeuvre, Hurtado experimented with technique and developed images of totemic moving figures that became increasingly abstract, eventually resembling flowing calligraphic script in cartoon-like strips. Hurtado had turned toward representational, conceptual, abstract, and transcendental self-portraiture by the mid-1960s, and continued in this vein throughout the 1970s. “[I]n a way, I have been doing self-portraits in one form or another since 1970,” Hurtado observed.6 Her journey of exploration of the self through self-portraiture led her to the reflection that her painting of the words “I am” was truer to her form and nature than a depiction of her visible self.7 Photographs, charcoal drawings, and paintings of her shadow similarly suggest that the visible, or outward self, is merely a reflection of Hurtado. Self-portraits of her shadow with a square mandala of light at the level of the heart offer a window into self as selfsame to the luminous and omnipresent.8 The period of these works, mid-life, was crucial not only in her oeuvre, but also in the development of her self-awareness, self-integration, and her understanding of herself as part of something greater than the autobiographical I—as part of an interconnected and animate natural world. In a large untitled self-portrait c. 1968, Hurtado depicted her reflection, perhaps browner than she normally was, in a hand mirror, against a completely brown canvas (Figure 1). Hurtado described herself and members of her birth family as “very dark” in letters of the 1940s, an artist statement of the late 1970s, and interviews during her nineties. She never forgot—revisiting in the late 1970s, interviews of the 1990s, and during the decade of her death—a childhood memory that took place in Venezuela that “gave her a lifelong aversion to a certain shade of pink.” Every year the parish priest would assign pink as the color of dress only to the “dark-complexioned” children dressed as angels for the Easter Mass service, leaving her with the childhood hope that one day “perhaps my complexion will change.”9 “Being a painter,” Hurtado wrote in the 1970s, “color has always been a very important part of my life, of myself. I go through color periods when anything purple, or red, or green, or blue seems magically endowed, but never ever a certain shade of pink.”10 Luchita Hurtado, Untitled (Self-Portrait). 82. 29 x 67.66 cm (c. 1968) © The Estate of Luchita Hurtado. Courtesy The Estate of Luchita Hurtado and Hauser & Wirth She explained the internalized racist colorism of her Venezuelan family while still in her twenties in a letter to Paalen in the late 1940s. She wrote that as a child her mother had warned her to stay out of the sun unless she wanted to be blacker than she already was.11 Much later in her life, and in a somewhat opaque way, she recalled being perceived as Italian or foreign when she arrived in the US. During Hurtado’s childhood, Italian immigrants and their children would still have remembered, if not experienced, discrimination as “darker,” Catholic, and/or largely working-class people. As for Latinos, Nicholasa Mohr (b. 1938) and Marta Moreno Vega (b. 1942) have documented the racialized discrimination they and their families experienced as Puerto Ricans in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s (Mohr 2011; Vega 2001). In response to a question about whether there were “any indigenous roots in your family tree,” Hurtado explained: There are people like me in my family in Venezuela that are very dark, but they don’t admit to having any native heritage in our bloodline, any native traditions or beliefs. I think people just don’t talk about that. It’s really hard to get any truth about it. When I used to go to my house in Taos and watch tribal dances, they wouldn’t ask me if I was Indian; they would say, ‘What tribe are you?’ I would reply, ‘Venezuelan.” And they’d say, ‘I’ve never heard of that one!’ When I moved to the US, people would always come up to me and ask ‘Can I take your picture?’ because I looked somehow, I don’t know, extraordinary to them. But somehow, within myself, I felt that I was Indian. I felt that connection very much when I went to those dances in Taos because the American Indian tribes have a very complete attitude toward the earth, that it is alive.12 The alienating feeling of being seen as not ordinary or different as a child in the US, and later during her travels in Europe with Lee Mullican and their son, stood in contrast to the feeling of acceptance she experienced at Indigenous ceremonies she attended in Taos, as well as to the belonging she experienced in Spain when told by a local who looked at her passport and showed her a map of southern Spain, “You’re not Venezuelan, you’re one of us”; she commented on this experience that it “felt good because wherever I went before people would ask, ‘And where are you from?’ They usually thought I was Italian.”13 Until the mid-1960s, Hurtado navigated and negotiated racism, colorism, and sexism, without the benefit of widespread anti-racist and feminist movements to support her. Hurtado’s early representational brown-on-brown untitled c. 1968 self-portrait would therefore seem to have been significant for Hurtado in coloring herself in identity with the adobe walls and rosy brown earth from which they were molded. Self here is of the same matter as earth, landscape, and mountain. Hurtado’s refusal to be defined or delimited by the dehumanizing racist colonial legacies of colorism typical of both Latin American and US cultures found support in the traditional, core Indigenous idea of a living, vibrant planet of interdependent beings,14 but also in the culturally open sensibility of many in the artistic and intellectual circles of her youth that opened them to non-European cultures, albeit at times in Eurocentric ways.15 In the 1920s through the 1940s, internationalism or cosmopolitanism were values held by many writers and visual artists in Europe, Latin America, and the US, brought together through travel and transnational print media, and the experiences of war, fascism, and exile. Many among the Surrealists and the circles around them criticized Western culture as bankrupt, actively seeking solutions to materialism, social alienation, religious hypocrisy, and the academic and bourgeois taming of art. Some sought solutions to the catastrophic European World Wars through the study of and travel to non-European cultures. Their criticism of materialistic rationalism also led many European artists and writers, not least the Surrealists, to the study of astrology, esoterica, mysticism, and in short, other ways of understanding being.16 Hurtado’s life-long oeuvre shows a powerful kinship to the worldviews and values of other women artists of her generation who were shaped in or around Surrealism and for whom esoteric, pre-Christian, and non-European worldviews were valuable in affirming more capacious ways of being human and in their sympathy with nature and a vibrant cosmos. Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) and Remedios Varo (1908–1963), for example, were friends and colleagues in the expatriate artistic circles Hurtado befriended during the late forties when she lived in Mexico City with Paalen.17 With them, Hurtado shared an abiding sense of the earthly—the telluric—as animate, and a respect for the mysterious in nature, visible in her totemic paintings begun in the 1940s. “I was fascinated by totems,” she recalled, in her nineties, “because of their relationship to the supernatural. They were made by witches to connect with people who departed this world. I felt a connection with the supernatural, the mysteries of the witches. There’s much that goes on in this world that we don’t understand.”18 The animacy of her totemic figures developed into the animacy of the landscape, through to the representation of her torso as landscape in the late 1960s and 1970s, and further to the effort to capture “light” in her Moth Lights series paintings. This identification of self with vibrant, living nature started with an awareness of her own body as a discrete, important, and unique form of self. Working with a feminist collective in Los Angeles in 1971 was pivotal for Hurtado. This was a time when she claimed her own surname as an artist and a time when she stopped turning her artwork toward the wall, away from visitors. In a long autobiographical statement, excerpted in the feminist journal Heresies in 1979, Hurtado reflected: “From the beginning, painting has been a most integral part of my life…. It took me a long time, however, to think of myself as unique.” In the longer typescript, Hurtado ended with a striking affirmation of self: “After all, settled and colonized, women have always seemed to hold their own, instinctively recognizing their true source, sensing their affinity to both mountain and leopard.”19 From 1969 through 1971, Hurtado produced clothed and nude downward gazing self-portraits, mostly untitled, as part of her I Am series. This is an era when she states that she realized she was her body; that, in a sense, all she had was her body. The series featured foreshortened views of the artist’s body from above, excluding her head. She began the paintings in the closet of her home in Chile while her husband Lee Mullican was on a year-long university exchange program. When she started the series, she didn’t have a studio. She reflected: I had to go in the closet because I didn’t want to see myself naked. In such a small space, the only way to see and paint my body was by looking down. Those self-portraits were a real surprise to me. I felt that all I had was myself. I discovered that my husband was having an affair with another woman, and I was very hurt… So through this pain I created drawings of couples and I also turned to my own body, myself.20 Painted or drawn while she was in her fifties, these self-portraits suggest a time of reflection about identity. The nude self-portraits suggest a rebirth, an important coming of age in self-awareness and self-acceptance: “The early canvases were corporeal, female nudes looking down at themselves, feet planted solidly on the ground and breasts like mountains. They seem to be is what I The of the I Am self-portraits, some of which are nearly life a visual affirmation of her female body, and of herself at by small a and the Indigenous in and which her “I have I have only myself. This is all I she wrote (Figure Hurtado would go on to paint herself in at and through the or as if moving other or as if in with the other (Figure Luchita Hurtado, on cm (c. © The Estate of Luchita Hurtado. Courtesy The Estate of Luchita Hurtado and Hauser & Wirth Luchita Hurtado, on cm © The Estate of Luchita Hurtado. Courtesy The Estate of Luchita Hurtado and Hauser & Wirth The self-portraits as of a multiple, self eventually way to a sense of the self, through identity with the natural landscape, the and the in nudes as landscape (Figure In the late 1970s, the human body by natural which in turn way to the increasingly and of the Sky Skin series. Hurtado’s of self and body as landscape are to feminist by other women artists in the 1970s such as landscape Hurtado’s nude self-portraits away from to a in a sensibility of the connection all life and as part natural these women artists their a and that patriarchal and the of as Hurtado it in Luchita Hurtado, on cm (c. © The Estate of Luchita Hurtado. Courtesy The Estate of Luchita Hurtado and Hauser & Wirth In the Sky Skin series, the brown body is the earth The of the human body and of the natural landscape are abstract, in the and In these or of the painting are with has the of looking out and up from an in the of our own A of is created through an sense of with the sky (Figure This is in a 2020 where Hurtado that the is the in a and you’re looking up at the as earth to earth, and are and the animacy of nature is in featuring one or more in or increasingly into the sky in and The of the is the Hurtado’s Sky us with the that are Luchita Hurtado, on cm (c. © The Estate of Luchita Hurtado. Courtesy The Estate of Luchita Hurtado and Hauser & Wirth Her word paintings of that same decade with of life, and life In like I I I Will Be the blue of the sky is the against which these words are and here is an with the During the 1970s, Hurtado also on with images of the words “I and such as In some of these works, words around a mandala-like a square that also her Moth series, and that, as also in Hurtado’s self-portraits as shadow (Figure Luchita Hurtado, on cm © The Estate of Luchita Hurtado. Courtesy The Estate of Luchita Hurtado and Hauser & Wirth In Hurtado’s identification with a vibrant, living planet would her toward the of her life to as a and to the of numerous untitled word and She the words on one canvas and the of and was on and to on of with human figures to them included They In Hurtado all on this planet together and all is a because they and we a series of birth paintings showed from brown viewed from the She one of these untitled paintings Through her art, Luchita Hurtado explored the self, the and the of life on the In her nineties, she that life and remained mysteries and that life was an one to which she had never During decades of Hurtado explored many of painting but a much of her work is the of the connection of the human to a natural world as and larger than human through as natural landscape, the of self into landscape or landscape and sky as the painting of or in the work in the years of her life, Hurtado the self and the surrounding world to us to the of a planet of interdependent life forms where we are one and only one among
DOI: 10.1093/jaac/kpaf019
Author: Laura E Pérez
Institution: University of California, Berkeley
Language: English
Topic: Art, Politics, and Modernism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,492
OpenAlex ID: W4411845963