ARTISTS/WRITERS: BRIDGET

Once at a dinner in San Miguel de Allende I was introduced to a tall, silver-haired woman in black. She was chain-smoking cheap, unfiltered Mexican Faros, huge rings on her fingers. She introduced herself as Bridget, her sepulchral voice emerging from a hollowed face with a thousand lines.

Bridget offered me a ride home, a dubious invitation as I could see she was very drunk. Our host discreetly suggested I take the wheel. We crammed into her decrepit VW bug, which didn't start until the others gave it a shove. I popped it into gear and we lurched off down the near-vertical street on brakes that barely gripped the cobblestones, Bridget cackling gaily.

I would get to know Bridget Tichenor in those years, and become fond of her, and learn some of her history. Born in Paris, the daughter of an Italian noblewoman and an English military man, she worked as a model in her teens for Coco Chanel and posed for photographer Man Ray. Arriving in New York during the war with Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, she studied painting at the Art Students League with the legendary Paul Cadmus. After a stint as a high fashion model and Vogue editor, she took off for Mexico City in the 1950’s to devote herself to painting.

Surrealism didn't really catch hold in the postwar US, the art world dominated by abstract expressionism. But it was intrinsic to Mexico and flourished there. Many of the best artists were women: Frida Kahlo, English Artist Leonard Carrington, Spanish artist Remedios Varo, the Hungarian Kati Horna, and Bridget Bate Tichenor. All produced mysterious, startlingly original works that have surged in value on the world’s art markets in recent decades.

In the 1960’s, Bridget ran off to the then-remote state of Michoacán and bought a ranch, painting and raising animals there until anarchist squatters occupied her property and drove her off. Suffering from quadruple emphysema, she fled to San Miguel at the invitation of an old friend.

Elegant, irreverent, original, Bridget struck me as a last connection to a disappearing Mexican bohemia. That night, and other nights thereafter, we’d pull up in front of my house, Bridget’s long, blue-veined, ring-bedecked hands quavering like butterflies over the steering wheel, Faro ashes dripping on her black clothes. “Come and visit me soon, darling.” We’d trade besos and she’d careen off down the cobbles in her dented VW.

When news came that Bridget had smoked her last Faro, her pin-sized alveoli refusing to admit another gulp of smoke, friends gathered at a small chapel on calle Insurgentes to remember her, and a fabled, extravagant, eccentric Mexico that had passed with her.

For more on her work and extraordinary life, go to: https://surrealism.website/tichenor.html