MERAUD GUINNESS GUEVERA

London, United Kingdom, 1904 — Paris, France, 1993

Born Meraud Michelle Wemyss Guinness in London, into the wealthy Anglo-Irish Guinness family, Meraud Guinness Guevara was a British painter, writer, and poet whose career spanned more than six decades and whose work, though largely absent from public collections, is estimated to number over four hundred paintings. She is remembered as a vehement defector from her aristocratic background who pursued art training with exceptional seriousness, moving between the most consequential studios and teachers of her generation.

Studying first at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks from 1923 to 1924, who instilled in her the classical rigor of draughtsmanship, she subsequently trained under Alexander Archipenko in New York (1926), writing monthly columns for Vogue during her time there. Afterwards she attended the Académie Julian and La Grande Chaumière in Paris. Her most formative influence was Francis Picabia, with whom she lived and studied in the south of France and who became both her mentor and her champion, arranging her first solo exhibition at Galerie Van Leer, Paris, in December 1928, for which Picabia himself wrote the catalogue preface. The exhibition introduced work marked by his "Transparencies" series: overlapping, semi-translucent figures rendered with collage, mixed media, string, and postage stamps. Guevara married Chilean painter Álvaro Guevara in 1929, and their Parisian dinner gatherings drew Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Picasso, Pierre Tal-Coat, and Giacometti.

Through the 1930s Guevara shifted toward figuration and portraiture under the influence of Giacometti and Tal-Coat, a transition the critic Waldemar George described as "a return to the sources of art" in his preface to her solo exhibition at the Valentine Gallery in 1939 New York. Protected by her Irish passport, she spent the war in the south of France. Her Still Life (1939) — location currently unknown, though its Picabia-inflected flat rendering and mysterious prism are consistent with work that was included in Peggy Guggenheim's Exhibition by 31 Women (1943). In the 1950s she experimented with gestural abstraction on plaster panels. Her painting, Still Life with Kitchen Objects (1938) was presented in 31 Mujeres at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid (2024–25), and in 31 Mulheres at MAC/CCB, Lisbon (2025). A single work is held in the Tate collection.Work by

Meraud Guinness Guevara is maintained as part of the 31 Women Collection to preserve the legacy of the first all-women's exhibition in the United States on record and to maintain Guevara's contributions in the record of art history.