SFMOMA, Part 37: Floor 2, 1900 to Now. Untitled (Luchita Hurtado, ca. 1947–1949).
Palette-knife blues laid on like a night sky. A tiny figure stands on dark earth, arms raised, reaching toward a cosmos that fills most of the canvas. Untitled, circa 1947–49 — 28⅝ by 37⅝ inches of oil on canvas, purchased by SFMOMA in 2020, the year its painter died — is a survivor in the literal sense. Almost none of Luchita Hurtado's work from her Mexican period survives. This is one of the pieces that made it out.
Luchita Hurtado, 1920–2020 — Venezuelan-born, raised in New York, dead at ninety-nine in Santa Monica. Three marriages: the Chilean journalist Daniel del Solar; the Austrian-Mexican Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen; the American artist Lee Mullican. Five children. A life spent inside the rooms where modern art was being argued — she sewed clothes for Agnes Martin, watched Leonora Carrington build her children a cardboard-box house, once had her feet massaged by Marcel Duchamp — and painting, always painting, mostly after 11 PM at the kitchen table when the children were asleep.
The Mexican years
This canvas comes from the Paalen marriage, the years outside Mexico City in the late 1940s. Mexico then was a crossroads: Breton passing through, Carrington and Varo settled, Paalen developing his Dynaton ideas. Hurtado painted in that weather — Surrealist-adjacent, cosmological, intimate. The figure reaching up from the earth is a self-portrait in spirit if not in likeness: the woman who said, late in life, "I never said no to life. I have a responsibility to the world, to my planet." The blues are a night sky, but they're also a decision — to look up, to reach, to make the canvas a vertical bridge between ground and stars.
The Mexican-period work is nearly all gone — lost, destroyed, dispersed. Which makes this painting's presence on a museum wall a small argument about survival: whose work gets kept, whose gets remembered, and what it costs a woman painting after 11 PM for decades to finally, at ninety-seven, walk into the Hammer's Made in L.A. and be seen. The art world discovered her at the end; she had been there the whole time, reaching up from the dark earth of the canvas.
So here's the thesis: this Untitled is one of the rare survivors of Hurtado's Mexican years — late-1940s blues like a night sky, a tiny figure reaching from earth toward cosmos, painted outside Mexico City during the Paalen marriage, in a period of which almost nothing remains. She painted for seventy years, mostly after the children were asleep, inside rooms where the famous argued — and the world noticed at ninety-seven. "I never said no to life." 🌁
Timeline — Luchita Hurtado
1920 — born October 28, Maiquetía, Venezuela
1940s — marries Daniel del Solar, then Wolfgang Paalen; lives in Mexico
ca. 1947–49 — paints Untitled outside Mexico City
1951 — marries Lee Mullican; five children; paints after 11 PM
2018 — Made in L.A. at the Hammer, age 97; breakthrough
2019 — named to the TIME 100
2020 — dies August 13, Santa Monica, age 99; SFMOMA acquires Untitled