![]() 4A on Strada Dimitrie Racoviță, Bucharest, Romania, 2017, by Corina Dîndărean She continued to paint, she told The New York Times in 2009, because “only my love of the straight line keeps me going.Top: Untitled, by Donald Judd, concrete sculpture, 1991, Israel MuseumĬentre: the Zollverein School of Management and Design Essen, Germany, 2005–2006, by SANAAīottom: House no. In 20, she was the subject of an exhibit at the Whitney, Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight.īy the end of her life, Herrera, suffering from severe arthritis, relied on a wheelchair to move about her studio. Why would anyone go to a hospital to take care of the lepers if they do not have the vocation of being nuns? It’s the same.”Īfter she made her first sale at age 89, Herrera's work attracted ever greater notice – and fetched ever greater prices, into the tens of thousands of dollars per piece. “People keep saying, ‘How do you work all those years without any reward, no money, few exhibitions’ Because it was a vocation. “I do it because I have to do it,” she told The Telegraph. Etel Adnan: Celebrated author who found fame as an artist later in life.Herrera recalled her indignation when, by her account, a gallerist in New York told her, “Carmen, you can paint circles around the men artists that I have, but I’m not going to give you a show because you’re a woman.” Herrera did find, however, that obscurity had its benefits she was free to pursue her art with no need to satisfy anyone but herself. “How can I explain it? It’s the beginning of all structures, really.”Īsked where a line ends, she replied, “It doesn't.” “There is nothing I love more than to make a straight line,” Herrera told The Sunday Telegraph in 2010. Herrera, Meyer said, was “working in a much cooler, cleaner way,” without “manifest brushwork.” fell somewhat between the cracks.” Herrera was working in what would become known as the minimalist style in the 1950s, when the abstract expressionism of artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline was ascendant. Herrera faced obstacles as a woman painting during a time when, Meyer said, “what we call the art world tended to be sexist and tended to diminish women's accomplishments.”īut also, he noted, “the style of her work. ![]() In 1954, she and her husband returned to New York, where he worked as a high school English teacher while she devoted herself to her artwork, generating little if any notice. I was angry that I didn't know about this before.” “I thought, ‘This is what I want to do.’ I went to the studio, and I worked and worked and worked and worked. “That was an eye-opener,” she told The Observer in 2010. The couple lived for a period in Paris, where Herrera, who had previously painted in a more traditional, representational style, began to explore abstract art in earnest after discovering the Salon des Realites Nouvelles, which cultivated abstract artists. She met a visiting American, Jesse Loewenthal, and returned with him to the United States. Herrera began painting as a child, went to finishing school in Paris and returned to Cuba to study architecture at the University of Havana. Her mother was a reporter for the publication and a committed feminist. Her father, who died when she was three, was the editor of the Havana newspaper El Mundo. Herrera was born in Havana in 1915 – on 30 May, according to her Cuban passport, or on 31 May, according to her US one – one of seven children in a progressive and affluent family. Herrera, Meyer said, “is an example of an artist persisting in her work, unaffected by lack of recognition, a lack of sales, pursuing her vision with great rigour and self-confidence and happily receiving recognition late in life.” Her works are also housed at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington and the Tate Modern in London. Last month, the National Gallery acquired two works by Herrera – an untitled painting in green and white, executed in 2013, and an untitled aluminium relief conceived in 1966 and completed in 2016. With her “hard-edged style of pared-down geometric shapes” and “simplified palettes”, she established herself as a leading abstract artist of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, James Meyer, the curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, said.
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