Carmen Herrera

Carmen Herrera was a prominent abstract artist whose works brought her international recognition late in life.

Biography of Carmen Herrera

Carmen Herrera was born in 1915 in Havana, Cuba. She commenced her artistic journey at the age of eight under the guidance of Professor Federico Edelmann y Pinto, who provided her with private art lessons. She credited these sessions with instilling discipline and equipping her with the foundational skills of academic drawing.

Continuing her pursuit, at the age of 14 in 1929, she enrolled at the Marymount School in Paris to further hone her skills. In 1938, Herrera pursued her academic endeavors by studying architecture at the Universidad de la Habana.

In 1939, Herrera tied the knot with English teacher Jesse Loewenthal (1902–2000), whom she had encountered in 1937 during his visit to Cuba from New York. Following their union, she relocated to New York to reside with him.

Between 1943 and 1947, she pursued studies at the Art Students League in New York City, benefiting from a scholarship she had received. Under the guidance of Jon Corbino (1905–1964), she delved into the realm of painting. However, her time at the Art Students League concluded in 1943 when she felt she had absorbed all she could from Corbino. Subsequently, she ventured into printmaking classes at the Brooklyn Museum for a year before discontinuing her studies there.

Despite her efforts in New York, Herrera encountered challenges in gaining inclusion in museum exhibitions and felt that Havana would have provided her with greater opportunities than those available in the United States.   

In 1948, Herrera and Loewenthal relocated to Paris, where they resided for nearly five years. During their time in Paris, Herrera encountered various international artists, including Theo van Doesburg, at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. Additionally, she became acquainted with French intellectuals and philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1950, Herrera made a brief return trip to Cuba, during which she produced a series of highly gestural abstract paintings.

However, upon returning to Paris, financial hardships and her husband's job prospects led the couple to move back to New York in 1953. 

For decades, Herrera's artistic talent went largely unrecognized, despite selling her first piece of art at the age of 19. Before her exhibitions at the renowned Lisson Gallery and Whitney Museum, her major solo show was in 1984 at the now-defunct Alternative Museum in New York.

As pointed out by Karen Rosenberg, Herrera's first solo exhibition took place over fifty years after she initially moved to New York in 1954. This lack of recognition can be attributed to prevailing attitudes towards women in the art world and Cuban-Americans in the United States, both of which were obstacles she had to overcome throughout her career.

However, this began to change for Herrera in 2004 when her close friend and advocate, painter Tony Bechara, recommended her to Frederico Sève, the owner of the Latin Collector Gallery in Manhattan. Sève was organizing a highly publicized show featuring female geometric painters, and after an artist dropped out, Bechara suggested Herrera as a replacement.

In 2019, Herrera's achievements were further acknowledged when she was elected as an Honorary Royal Academician (HonRA) to the Royal Academy of Arts in London.  

In her later years, Carmen Herrera lost the ability to walk and relied on full-time caregivers while living at home. Throughout this period, her close friend and neighbor, Tony Bechara, provided her with artistic guidance and feedback. Carmen Herrera passed away on February 12, 2022.

Carmen Herrera's Art Style

Mastering crisp lines and contrasting chromatic planes, Herrera wielded paint with precision to evoke symmetry, asymmetry, and an endless array of movement, rhythm, and spatial tension across her canvases.

Transitioning from biomorphism to pure geometric abstraction during her time in Paris in the late 1940s, she introduced shaped, elliptical, and tondo canvases, while also pioneering the use of solvent-based acrylic paints in post-war Europe.

By the mid-1960s, Herrera had delved into experimentation with significantly reduced palettes, often pairing black or green with white, which she likened to "saying yes and no." Eventually, she transcended the confines of the picture plane altogether and embarked on her inaugural series of sculptural works known as Estructuras. These pieces occupied not only walls and floors but also the public realm, while also honoring her earlier training in architecture.

Herrera's expanding body of work quietly but consistently fostered a cross-cultural dialogue within the global narrative of modernist abstraction. Additionally, her art resonates with the works of her contemporaries, such as Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith.