Carmen Herrera

Untitled (Red and White)

2011

Born May 30, 1915, in Havana, Cuba, Carmen Herrera was educated in Havana and Paris, studying art, art history, and architecture. In 1939 she married an American, Jesse Loewenthal. She moved to New York City, where she attended classes at the Art Students League and was a frequent visitor to the Whitney Museum of American Art. From 1948 to 1953, Herrera and Loewenthal lived in Paris, where she became associated with an international group of artists, the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. Herrera exhibited her work with them regularly and developed a distilled, geometric style of abstraction, reducing her palette to three colors for each composition and then to two. Herrera's hard-edged canvases emerged when Ellsworth Kelly, whose time in France overlapped with Herrera's, began producing his abstractions around the same time that Frank Stella began producing his famous black paintings. Herrera's ascetic compositions, which prefigured the development of Minimalism by almost a decade, did not find a warm reception when she returned to New York in 1954, a time when Abstract Expressionism still reigned supreme. As both a woman and an immigrant, Herrera faced significant discrimination in the art world. Yet, she persisted and continued to paint for the next six decades, only rarely exhibiting her work publicly. Herrera worked almost every day in her studio, and her oeuvre demonstrated a disciplined but highly sophisticated exploration of color and form. As she once stated, "I believe that I will always be in awe of the straight line; its beauty is what keeps me painting." Since the late 1990s, Herrera has garnered increasing attention for her work, selling her first painting in 2004. The last significant museum presentation of Herrera's work in this country was a 2005 show at Miami Art Central, preceded only by a 1998 show of her black and white paintings at El Museo del Barrio and a 1985 show at The Alternative Museum, both in New York. Her first monographic presentation in Europe was held at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England; in 2009, she traveled to Museum Pfalzgalerie, Kaiserslautern, Germany. In the last decade, the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and Tate Modern have all acquired works by the artist. She died at the age of 106, in New York, in 2022.