The breakthrough came very late, but still in time. In 2004, Cuban-American painter Carmen Herrera sold her first painting. The artist, born in Havana in 1915 to a newspaper publisher and a journalist, was already 89 years old. A little later, large museums such as the New York Museum of Modern Art or the London Tate suddenly became interested in Herrera’s pictures. The artist took interest in her art with humor and humility. “I never had any concept of money in my life, and I thought of fame as a very vulgar thing,” she told the magazine a few years ago New York Times. “So I just worked and waited. And at the end of my life I get a lot of recognition, to my amazement and joy.” Herrera, who studied painting and architecture in Havana in the 1930s and then went to New York, had worked almost unnoticed by the rest of the art world in her Manhattan studio for almost seventy years. Today, her abstract, angular art is a natural part of the pioneering department in the canon of modernism.
Away from the zeitgeist and unimpressed by the abstract expressionism that set the tone at the time, Herrera found her geometric-abstract style in New York at the end of the 1950s with black and white contrasts or in bright yellow, blue, orange, green or pink tones. She placed the art of reduction at the center of her artistic work. What interested her was the essence of the images and the variety of possibilities that come with the disciplined confinement to formal clarity. Consequently, Herrera built up her paintings like architecture using color fields, edges, zigzag lines or squares. “It’s the beauty of the straight line that drives me,” the painter herself once described the motor behind her art.
A marathon runner who just kept going
“Keep it simple” was her motto. She stayed true to minimalism to the end. The later success proved her right. After moving to New York in 1939, where she was friends with Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt and cultivated acquaintances with Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning and Mark Rothko, she spent a few artistically formative years in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Paris. There she was in the same circles of artists as Yves Klein, Josef Albers, Jean Arp and Sonia Delaunay. The artist lived and worked in the heart of the Western art world and was part of the scene, but this was not reflected in sales or exhibitions.
When her art was finally discovered and appreciated around the year 2000, Herrera embodied a rare counter-model in the art world steeped in youth cult. Not only was she hailed as a pioneer of geometric abstraction, but also as a marathon runner who just kept going and eventually prevailed over the ignorance of museum curators, dealers and collectors for herself and her art. In 2016, at the age of 101, the painter was able to celebrate the major retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum, which consolidated her international fame. The exhibition was subsequently shown at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, among other places. Carmen Herrera died last Saturday in New York at the age of 106.