Carmen Herrera

Carmen Herrera (born May 31, 1915, Havana, Cuba—died February 12, 2022, New York, New York, U.S.) was a Cuban-born American painter whose geometric abstractions explored the relationships among color, line, form, and space. Informed by her early architectural training, she developed a hard-edged style defined by clear boundaries, reduced palettes, and a balance of positive and negative space. Although her work anticipated key developments in Minimalism and Op art, Herrera painted in relative obscurity for decades, receiving widespread acclaim late in life.

Early life and education

Herrera was raised by intellectual parents in Havana. She took art lessons when she was young, and as a teenager she was sent to Paris to further her studies. Upon her return to Cuba, she made sculptures of wood and later began studying for an architecture degree at the University of Havana, though the tumultuous political situation in the country following Fulgencio Batista’s seizure of power prevented her from finishing. She relocated in 1939 to New York City, where she pursued mostly figurative painting at the Art Students League and struck up friendships with other artists, including Barnett Newman.

Career

Only after returning to Paris in 1948, however, did Herrera fully develop her artistic identity, finding inspiration from the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles (“Salon of New Realities”), a group of artists who mounted an annual exhibition featuring abstract, mostly nonrepresentational work by figures such as Josef Albers and Jean Arp. Reducing her formal vocabulary to its essential elements, Herrera started creating paintings in which boldly colored, sharply defined geometric shapes predominated, and she exhibited this new work through the salon in 1949–52.

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In 1954 Herrera settled permanently in New York City. She produced strong work throughout the 1950s, particularly the beginning of a series of stark black-and-white paintings, but her art did not receive the same recognition accorded her peers. Contributing to this lack of recognition were prejudices among some gallery owners against women and Latin American artists. The period’s fashion for Abstract Expressionism also left relatively little space for Herrera’s geometric work, some of which prefigured the later trends of Op art and hard-edged Minimalism. Nonetheless, Herrera herself cared little for fame during this time, preferring to concentrate on painting rather than publicity.

Herrera continued her precise chromatic explorations in the 1960s and ’70s in works such as Blanco y verde (1966), a triangular sliver of green against an austere white field, and Saturday (1978), a jet-black canvas interrupted by a thick gold zigzag. She also demonstrated an interest in pushing beyond painting’s traditional structural limitations. Since her days in Paris, she had experimented with nonrectangular canvases, and she played with dimensionality in works such as Amarillo (1971), painted on four-inch plywood.

Recognition in later life

In 1984 Herrera received her first retrospective, which was held at the Alternative Museum in New York City. She sold her first painting in 2004 when, at age 89, she was included in a show of women painters practicing geometric abstraction at New York City’s latincollector gallery (later Frederico Sève Gallery). From then on, her art-world stock skyrocketed. Her works were acquired for the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and Tate Modern in London. Following the success of a traveling retrospective in Europe, “Carmen Herrera: Recent Works” opened at Frederico Sève Gallery in 2010. A 29-minute documentary on Herrera, The 100 Years Show by Alison Klayman, was released in 2015.

Herrera’s recognition continued to grow after her centenary. In 2016 the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, organized “Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight,” a survey of more than 50 works dating from 1948 to 1978. The exhibition, which traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, the following year, helped establish Herrera as an important figure in the history of postwar abstraction. In her final years Herrera also returned to a series of geometric Estructuras (“Structures”) that she had designed in the 1960s but had never realized. The works were presented in 2019 in City Hall Park, New York City. Herrera continued working into her final years and died in New York City in 2022 at age 106.

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