Meraud Guevara (1904-1993)

Meraud Guevara (née Guinness), was a British painter, writer and poet. Her father was Benjamin Guinness - an Anglo-Irish businessman and financier - and her mother, Bridget Bulkeley, was an artist. She studied under Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Fine Art (1923-4), in New York under Alexander Archipenko (1926), and at the Académie Julian in Paris (1927).

Her family wealth allowed her to enjoy a fashionably bohemian life in the course of which she met Christopher Wood, in whose paintings she featured. When her family thwarted their elopement, they installed her at Mougins where she became attached to the household of Francis Picabia. In April 1928, she wrote the catalogue preface for his New York exhibition (Intimate Gallery) and, in December, Picabia did the same for her first exhibition, Méraud Michael Guinness, at the Galerie Van Leer, Paris. The influence of Picabia's contemporary 'Transparencies' series was evident in her paintings of overlapping linear figures.

In 1929, she married the London-based Chilean artist Alvaro Guevara, and they settled in Paris. Here, Guevara was friendly with Gertrude Stein and the Parisian Neo-Romantic painters. However, she turned to realism, reflecting her friendship and shared concerns with the sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Guevara was also included in 31 Women, one of the century's most important surveys of women artists held at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century Gallery, New York, in 1943. She was one of thirty-one artists selected, and appeared alongside other female painters and sculptors who would become prominent in the years to come. These included Dora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim and Dorothea Tanning, among others.