The painter Lucinda Urrusti at her home in Xochimilco, Mexico City, in 2022.Claudia Aréchiga
The last faces of Spanish Republican exile in Mexico gradually disappeared. Lucinda Urrusti, avant-garde painter and portraitist of great cultural and bohemian figures of the Federal District of the time such as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz or Juan Rulfo, died this Saturday in Mexico City, as announced Spanish Athenaeum.
Born in Melilla in 1926 to a Basque Republican soldier, she left Spain when the victory of General Francisco Franco’s fascist side was imminent. He and his family fled to France for a time, eventually crossing the ocean in 1939 aboard the Sinaia, the first ship sent by Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas to help Spanish exiles. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Mexico would end up taking in 25,000 people fleeing the Spanish civil war.
During an interview with EL PAÍS last May, at the age of 95, in the house in Xochimilco where he spent his last leg, he recalled a life like in the movies: meetings in cafes about art, literature and politics with some the most influential intellectuals of the moment; by the bohemianism of a shattered and stimulating city; of oils, ink and paint; applause at his home on November 20, 1975, the day Franco died.
His brush immortalized the faces of García Márquez, Fuentes, Paz and Rulfo, but also the Mexican Nobel Peace Prize winner Alfonso García Robles or the historian Beatriz R. de la Fuente. His style rejected the then-dominant muralism and leaned toward more surreal pieces, sometimes bordering on Impressionism. The Ministry of Culture lamented on Twitter “the sensitive death of the painter Lucinda Urrusti, who was part of the La Ruptura generation and whose work is a benchmark in contemporary Mexican art”.
Urrusti never wanted to go back to Spain, not even after the dictator’s death. He found a home in Mexico, from which he moved to New York for just a decade. His work was admired by critics and contemporaries. Carlos Fuentes wrote about her: “I have been following the artistic development of Lucinda Urrusti since we were young together (…). Urrusti’s originality, ephemeral both from the beginning [Paul] Cézanne from the dawn of [Claude] Monet, is that his figures tend to appear and disappear simultaneously. (…) Thanks to his images, I evoke certain Spanish exploits, that goofy and suicidal greatness of resistance that goes from the siege of Numancia to Goya’s May 2nd to the siege of Madrid by the fascists…”.
He exhibited at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico and in galleries in New York. She was friends with other artists banned from the Franco dictatorship, such as Vicente Rojo and Enrique Climent, who came to portray her. He National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL) has joined in mourning his death: “We grieve the sensitive death of nationalized Mexican painter Lucinda Urrusti, who studied at INBAL’s La Esmeralda National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving. We send his family a supportive hug.”
When she married she was living in San Ángel with her ex-husband, the late filmmaker Archibaldo Burns. Her neighbor was the painter Juan O’Gorman, and she began attending the meetings the artist organized at his home on Saturday afternoons. Writers and poets, painters and philosophers took part. “We were all friends then, it was a time when there were no people who were more important than others,” he recalls in an interview with this newspaper.
“Major artist of the Rupture generation, his style is considered Post-Impressionist. She also worked on portraits, three-dimensional paintings and sculptures,” said the Spanish Athenaeum, of which she was a board member between 1995 and 1998. Her nephew, filmmaker Juan Francisco Urrusti, made a documentary about her, Lucinda Urrusti. Painter (2020), which covers her work but omits episodes from the artist’s life, such as the New York decade or the death of a son before she was 40, a blow from which her family says she never recovered.
He spent his final years in a stone house in Xochimilco, south of Mexico City, full of flowers and trees reminiscent of an Andalusian courtyard. When EL PAÍS visited her, her mind was already playing tricks on her and some episodes were confused in her memory. However, he still maintained a clean, open-eyed look and a bright smile that appeared as he recalled his glory years, which he summed up in one sentence: “The world was smaller then.”
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