Better late than never. This expression is particularly true with regard to the painter Carmen Herrera, who died on February 12 at the age of 106 in her Manhattan loft. Working incognito throughout her career, exhibiting tirelessly but without selling any paintings, the pioneer of geometric abstraction achieved success late in life, following a group exhibition at the Latin Collector Gallery in New York in 2004. it was during this period that she sold her first work at the age of 90. To go as far as the picture rails of the Whitney Museum, which is devoting a retrospective to him in 2016. His paintings and sculptures, a joyous cocktail of triangles, rectangles, broken lines and contrasting colors, then met with great success at auctions and at fairs. . The fact of being a Latin American woman in the milieu of willingly sexist minimalist painting explains her late success.
Continuing her painting as if nothing had happened, Carmen Herrera was neither stopped nor held back by the lack of recognition. Come what may, she continued to paint by “love of the pure line”, as she told the New York Times in 2009, considering that “Glory was something vulgar”. “It’s like a bus, which I’ve waited for almost a hundred years”, she also said.
The search for colors and pure shapes
Born in Havana in 1915, the artist grew up in a progressive family: her father was the founder ofThe world in Cuba and her mother, a feminist, works as a reporter. It was in Paris and Havana that Carmen Herrera studied art, art history and architecture. During the war, as a student at the Art Students League in New York (1942-1943), she met Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly, great figures of abstract expressionism. In the 1950s, the Cuban-American artist exhibited at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris, a pool of abstraction, concrete art and geometric art. If she lives between Havana and Paris in the 30s and 40s, she settles permanently in New York in 1954. And perseveres without flinching, living on little, financially supported by her husband, in her search for colors and pure shapes. . In 2004, his style was compared by a critic of the New York Times to that of Piet Mondrian, Ellsworth Kelly and Lygia Clark: his success finally broke out. Today, his paintings are part of the collections of Moma, the Tate Modern or the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In Paris, in 2021, two of his paintings were noticed in the exhibition “Elles font l’abstraction” at the Center Pompidou.