Bridget Bate Tichenor

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Bridget Bate Tichenor (born November 22, 1917 in Paris , † October 12, 1990 in Mexico City ) was a Mexican surrealist painter .

life and work

Bate Tichenor was born in Paris to Frederick Blantford Bate and Vera Bate Lombardi . She attended schools in England , France and Italy and at the age of 16 moved to live with her mother in Paris , where she worked as a model for Coco Chanel . From 1930 to 1938 she lived in Rome and Paris. Man Ray , the surrealist photographer and closest friend of her father, photographed her at various stages of her modeling career from Paris to New York, as did the photographers Cecil Beaton , Irving Penn , John Rawlings and George Platt Lynes . In 1939, Vogue magazine announced the marriage of Bridget Pamela Arkwright Bate to Hugh J. Chisholm, a Yale- trained poet and heir to a paper fortune. After the arranged marriage, she moved to New York , where she studied with Reginald Marsh as a student at the Art Students League of New York . After divorcing her first husband in 1944, she married Jonathan Tichenor, an assistant to photographer George Platt Lynes, in 1945. She worked for Vogue (magazine) under the direction of Edna Woolman Chase and Jessica Daves until she divorced her second husband in 1953. She moved to Mexico where her cousin and art collector Edward James owned an estate. Here she began painting, in which she had already been taught in Italy by the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico . In New York in 1945 she had been a student of Paul Cadmus , who combined the meticulous Renaissance technique of tempera painting with realistic subjects. In 1958 she took part in the First Salon for Women's Art at the Galerías Excelsior in Mexico, together with Leonora Carrington Alice Rahon , Remedios Varo and other contemporary painters of her time. In the same year she bought the Contembo Ranch on a steep hill overlooking the Pátzcuaro Lake near the remote village of Ario de Rosales in Michoacán , where she painted in her extensive animal menagerie until 1978. She developed a painting technique based on Italian tempera formulas from the 16th century. She prepared a gesso ground finished with eggshells on masonite and painted many transparent oil glazes with small brushes. This created a polished, jewel-like surface on her paintings. She developed her own symbolic language and populated her pictures with various strange beings, often enclosed in egg shape. Her closest friends and artistic contemporaries in Mexico included the painters Leonora Carrington, Alan Glass , Zachary Selig and the artist Pedro Friedeberg . From 1982 to 1984 she lived in Rome and painted a number of paintings. She spent her final years at her home in San Miguel de Allende , Guanajuato , Mexico.

Exhibitions (selection)

  • 2008: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico
  • 2012: LACMA 2012, Los Angeles
  • 2012: Museo de la Ciudad de México
  • 2019: Surrealism in Mexico, Di Donna Galleries, New York
  • 2020: Fantastic Women, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bate Tichenor, Bridget
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tichenor, Bridget; BBT; Arkwright Bate, Pamela (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Mexican surrealism painter
DATE OF BIRTH November 22, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH October 12, 1990
Place of death Mexico city