Carmen Herrera - A Flourishing Long Overdue

Mar 16, 2022

Carmen Herrera (May 30, 1915-February 12, 2022) was a Cuban-American artist, renowned for her abstract minimalist compositions and geometric application of color. Her recent death has brought about much retrospection regarding her artwork and her career trajectory. Though today she is a well-respected and famed abstractionist painter, Herrera only received recognition during the very last years of her life. It is thus a timely moment to remember and honor the legacy of the creative pioneer.

Early Influences and Derivations of Eminence

Carmen Herrera lived a long and abundant 106 years. But imagine that the artist’s first major documented art sale was not until the age of 89. Nonetheless, these circumstances reflect less a story of the late self-discovery of hidden artistic talent—rather, Herrera displayed a lifelong dedication to art and displayed decades worth of experience and technique, starting from her childhood. Born in Havana, Cuba, Herrera learned the fundamentals of drawing at a young age, taking private art lessons beginning from eight years old. She was one of seven siblings, and her parents were both journalists; Herrera was thus often surrounded by members of Havana’s intellectual social groups growing up. She noted that her parents were always rather anti-establishment, and she even witnessed the imprisonment of numerous relatives for their dissidence. Turned off by extreme political views, Herrera continued studying art during her youth in Cuba, training in academic drawing and approaching her work with a dedicated discipline. Wishing to pursue her creative practice further, she traveled to Paris to finish her schooling, subsequently returning to Havana to enter university and study architecture.

Her choice to enter a male-dominated domain without hesitation was just one of the many early signs of her determination and rejection of the status quo. However, she simultaneously struggled to concentrate on her work, mainly due to the volatile political environment surrounding her. Revolutions and strikes often forced her university to close their doors for periods at a time, enforcing her stance on the undoings of political extremism. It was also at this time that Herrera became fascinated with the line, almost as if simplifying her studies of architecture to its most basic and pristine essence. She realized that lines were the foundation for all existing shapes and forms, and Herrera fell in love with the inherent beauty of their power to construct, connect, and define.

Carmen Herrera - Wednesday, 1978. Tuesday, 1978. Sunday, 1978. Friday, 1978. Thursday, 1975. Acrylic on Canvas (From left to right). Lines of Sight exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York, 2016. Installation view.

Conceptual Migrations

The artist never completed her architecture degree. In 1939, she moved to New York City after she met Jesse Lowenthal, a young American schoolteacher. For perhaps a multitude of reasons (political tensions, an urge to continue feeding her passion for the visual arts, and the burgeoning of young love, to name a few), she decided it best to relocate her life and career. In New York, Herrera took advantage of any spaces in the city where she could display her work: storefront windows, sidewalks, makeshift galleries. She was nowhere near a commercial success but remained undeterred. By this point, she knew being an artist would be her life’s mission and she was aware it was an inherently difficult life, but she could not deny what she felt was her purpose.

This determination led her to Paris in the 1940s. Her childhood schooling in France made it easy to integrate, and she made friends with writers and artists in the city. Here, she exhibited with the Salon de Réalités Nouvelles, a revolving collective of abstract artists. It was during this time in Paris that Herrera nurtured her quintessential stark geometric style of painting. At this point, she was using less than three pure colors on each composition. Imagine flat and perfectly-even application of colors, hard-edged juxtapositions of hues, sharp forms separated only by crisp differences in tones. She applied this innovative approach at the same time as color field pioneer Ellsworth Kelly and renowned post-painterly abstractionist Frank Stella. Her avant-garde spirit and instinct for the ultra-modern are now undeniable, even if it was disregarded during her years as an emerging artist.

Carmen Herrera - Red and White, 1976. Epiphany, 1971. Red Square, 1974. Acrylic on Canvas (From left to right). Lines of Sight exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York, 2016. Installation view.

The Forging for a Platform

Herrera eventually returned to New York, and her paintings continued to turn towards an increasingly minimalist aesthetic. She referred to her creative process as purification, and simplicity became a virtue of her oeuvre. Her work failed to receive rave reviews, but it was not the simple factor of her art being “too sterile.” Rather, the dismissal of her forward-looking point-of-view speaks to the greater societal injustices that affected her until the very end of her life, highlighting inequalities that still exist in the art world to this day. Herrera was a woman artist and an immigrant, she was thus constantly neglected or considered an outsider underserving of the spotlight reserved for the trending abstract expressionist works created by Western male artists.

Herrera finally began garnering attention when in 2004, a prominent Latin collector entered her into a publicized group show in New York City. Her evident talent and foresight were finally being recognized by a larger public, and she finally experienced the beginnings of commercial success during the final decade of her life. Herreras’s delayed discovery exposed the shortcomings of the art world and the artist has become an inspiration and code-breaker for Latina women artists facing both external and internalized sexism, xenophobia, and racial prejudice.

Carmen Hererra - All Untitled, 1966, except the yellow one: Untitled, 1962. Lines of Sight exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York, 2016. Installation view.

Breakthrough and Reflection

Carmen Herrera has since been honored with major retrospective exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. She is also featured in prominent permanent collections such as the Tate Museum. Her delayed success provides an optimistic ending, but it should not erase the lifelong obstacles she faced, that many others never had to. Herrera’s life work is a testament to her talent and dedication. She has left us with an oeuvre of striking canvases, intriguing shapes and contours, and unique philosophy on the relation between line and life. Her creative practice serves equally as an opportunity for reflection on how we can create a more inclusive and enriching art world to come.

Featured image: Carmen Hererra - Untitled, 1952. Black and White, 1952. (From left to right). Lines of Sight exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York, 2016. Installation view.
All images by IdeelArt