Bridget Bate Tichenor

Bridget Bate Tichenor was a British surrealist painter, fashion model, and fashion editor who studied at the Slade School of Art, London; École des Beaux Arts, Paris; and the Art Students League of New York. Born in Paris, she later embraced Mexico as her chosen home. Bate Tichenor’s art has often been related to so-called ‘fantastic art’ (a broad and loosely defined art genre unrestricted to a specific school of artists, geographical location or historical period; characterised by subject matter—which portrays non-realistic, mystical, mythical or folkloric subjects or events—and style, which is representational and naturalistic, rather than abstract) in the school of magic realism (a style of art that presents a realistic view of the world while incorporating magical elements, often blurring the lines between speculation and reality).

Although born in France, Bate Tichenor spent her youth in England and later attended schools in France, Italy, and England, staying in the splendid homes of her mother’s relatives, such as the Duke of Westminster (Hugh Grosvenor, 1879–1953, British landowner and aristocrat noted for his support of the Nazi ideology and his extramarital affair with Coco Chanel), in England and France, the Savoia family, in Rome, and the Agnelli’s in Florence. Whilst in Italy, Bate Tichenor was mentored in the art of drawing by the legendary artist Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978, Italian artist and writer who, in the years before World War I, founded the scuola metafisica art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists).

Aged 16, she then went to live with her mother in Paris, taking up work as a model for Coco Chanel (1883–1971, French fashion designer, the only designer listed on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, and founder of the Chanel brand, whose ‘Chanel No. 5’ scent remains an internationally iconic product).

Between the years 1930 and 1938, Bate Tichenor subsequently alternated between Rome and Paris. It was during these years that Man Ray (1890–1976, American visual artist who significantly contributed to the Dada and Surrealist movements and was noted for his work with photograms, which he called ‘rayographs’ in reference to himself) discovered her extraordinary looks and immortalised her in his iconic photographs. Bate Tichenor would also become a sought-after subject for other legendary photographers, like Sir Cecil Beaton CBE (1904–1980, British photographer, painter, interior designer, and costume and set designer for stage and screen whose accolades include three Academy Awards and four Tony Awards) and Irving Penn (1917–2009, American photographer known for his fashion photography, portraits, and still lifes, whose work continues to inform the art of photography), over the years.

In order to remove Bate Tichenor from Europe and the looming threat of World War II, her mother devised an arranged marriage, through the introduction of Cole Porter (1891–1964, American composer and songwriter known for his witty and urbane lyrics) and his wife Linda, between Bate Tichenor and Hugh Joseph Chisholm. The marriage took place at the Chisholm family home, Strathglass in Port Chester, New York, on October 14, 1939.

Relocating to New York City, she lived in an apartment in the luxurious 18-storey, French Renaissance-inspired château style Plaza Hotel, studied at the Art Students League of New York (1943-1945), and met Anaïs Nin (1903–1977, French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica), who wrote about her infatuation with Bate Tichenor in her personal diary.

In 1944 Bate Tichenor divorced Chisholm and moved into an Upper East Side townhouse in Manhattan that she shared with art patron, collector, socialite, and bohemian Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979, American heiress who collected art in Europe and America between 1938 and 1946, settling in Venice, Italy, in 1949, where she lived and exhibited her collection for the rest of her life). Bate Tichenor, soon after, married Jonathan Tichenor in 1945, taking his last name to become known as Bridget Bate Tichenor.

After visiting Mexico, Bate Tichenor obtained a divorce from her second husband and moved to Mexico in 1953, quitting her job as a professional fashion and accessories editor for Vogue in New York (a position she held between 1945 and 1952).

At the time of Bate Tichenor’s move to Mexico in 1953, she began what would become a lifetime journey through her art and mysticism, inspired by her belief in ancestral spirits, to achieve self-realisation. Having lived in varied European and American cultures with multiple identities reflecting her life passages, Bate Tichenor recognised the Pre-Columbian cycles of creation, destruction, and resurrection that echoed the events of the catastrophes of her own life mounted within the dismantling and reconstructive context of two World Wars. The openness of Mexico at that time fuelled her personal expectations of a future filled with endless artistic inspiration in a truly new world founded upon metaphysics, where a movement of societal, political, and spiritual ideals was being immortalised in the arts.

In 1958, she participated in the First Salon of Women’s Art at the Galerías Excelsior of Mexico, together with Remedios Varo (1908–1963, Spanish and Mexican surrealist painter), Alice Rahon (1904-1987, French-born Mexican poet and artist whose work contributed to the beginning of abstract expressionism in Mexico), Leonora Carrington OBE (1917–2011, British-born, naturalised Mexican surrealist painter and novelist who spent most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s) and other female contemporary painters of her era.

That same year, she bought the Contembo ranch near the remote village of Ario de Rosales, Michoacán, where she built a simple two-storey Tuscan-style country villa in brick and adobe and painted reclusively, with her extensive menagerie of pets, until 1978.

Bate Tichenor’s paintings were initially sold, in 1954, by the Ines Amor Gallery in Mexico City and later by her patron, Mexican art dealer and collector Antonio de Souza, at the Galeria de Souza, Mexico. In 1972 and 1974 she exhibited at the Galeria Pecanins, Mexico.

Towards the end of her life, Bate Tichenor became emotionally exhausted and began to physically deteriorate. After a couple of years back in Europe (living in Rome between 1982 and 1984), she returned to Mexico, where she continued painting and lived her last years in a home (built to her specifications by her close friend, the Swedish shipping owner Eric Noren) in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. Her last exhibition was a comprehensive retrospective at the Instituto de Bellas Artes de San Miguel de Allende in February 1990. Bate Tichenor passed away in Mexico City on October 12, 1990, at the age of seventy-two.

Having previously been somewhat overshadowed by other surrealist artists, Bate Tichenor’s art has gradually begun to receive the recognition it deserves in recent decades, with interest in her work by art collectors and museums increasing greatly in recent years. Since the early 2000s some fifty works, or thereabouts, by the artist have passed through the sale rooms of international auction houses, fetching up to €365,000 (achieved by Misioneros, 1965, oil and plaster on Masonite, 40 x 40 cm, when sold at Christie’s, New York, in 2024). This development was initiated by Christie’s New York’s Rockefeller Plaza auction in July 2007 when two paintings by Bate Tichenor, in (Mexican actress) María Felix’s estate sale, both sold for nearly 10 times the estimates.

In 2008, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico, included Bate Tichenor’s work, among 50 prominent Mexican artists such as Frida Kahlo (1907– 1954, Mexican surrealist or magical realist painter who, in her often autobiographical art, employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society), in the exhibition History of Women: Twentieth-Century Artists in Mexico centring on women who had developed their artistic activities within individual and diverse disciplines while working in Mexico.

Bate Tichenor was also featured in the 2012 exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, organised by LACMA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A., and MAM, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City. This was complemented by Bate Tichenor’s retrospective, showing more than 100 paintings, at the Museo de la Ciudad de México (Museum of the City of Mexico), also in 2012. More recently, Bate Tichenor’s art was also included in the group exhibition Surrealism in Mexico at the Di Donna Galleries in New York, NY, U.S.A.

Works by Bate Tichenor are nowadays found in important international private and museum collections in the United States, Mexico and Europe, like the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, and the Museo de la Ciudad de México.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation