Carmen Herrera

	Carmen Herrera
	;
Birth:	30 May 1915; Havana, Cuba
Death:	12 February 2022; New York City, New York State, USA
Age:	106 years, 257 days
Country:	CUBUSA
	Centenarian

Carmen Herrera (30 May 1915 – 12 February 2022) was a Cuban-American centenarian, abstract visual artist and painter. She was born in Havana Cuba and has lived in New York City since the mid-1950s. Herrera's abstract works have brought her international recognition late in life.

Biography[]

Early life[]

Herrera was born in Havana, Cuba on 30 May 1915. She was one of seven siblings. Her parents, Antonio Herrera y López de la Torre (1874–1917) and Carmela Nieto de Herrera (1875–1963), were part of Havana’s intellectual circle. Antonio had served as a captain in the Cuban army during the war for independence from Spain (1895–98). After the war, he became executive editor of Cuba’s first post-independence newspaper, El Mundo, founded in 1901. Carmela was a pioneering journalist and respected author, philanthropist, and feminist. Herrera began taking private art lessons from professor Federico Edelmann y Pinto when she was eight years old. Herrera attributes these lessons to her facility for discipline and for providing her with the fundamentals of academic drawing. She furthered her training in 1929, at the age of 14, when she attended the Marymount School in Paris. In 1938, Herrera continued her education at the Universidad de la Habana to study architecture, where she stayed for only one academic year because in the time she wanted to pursue her architectural career there. This year had a strong impact on Herrera and she is quoted as saying, “There, an extraordinary world opened up to me that never closed: the world of straight lines, which has interested me until this very day."

Middle years: (1939–early 1960s)[]

In 1939, Herrera married English teacher Jesse Loewenthal (1902–2000), whom she had met in 1937 when he was visiting Cuba from New York. She moved to New York to be with him and they lived in his apartment on East Nineteenth Street. From 1943 to 1947, she studied at the Art Students League in New York City, where she had received a scholarship. Here, she studied painting with Jon Corbino (1905–1964). She left the Art Students League in 1943 when she felt that she had learned all that she could from Corbino. She then began taking printmaking classes at the Brooklyn Museum, but left there after a year. In New York, Herrera struggled with being included in museum exhibitions, and felt that Havana would have provided her with more opportunities than she was offered in the United States.

In 1948, Herrera and Loewenthal moved to Paris, where they stayed for nearly five years. At the time, the city was a meeting place for various artistic styles and movements, including influences from the Bauhaus and Russian Suprematism. Herrera encountered various international artists such as Theo van Doesburg in Paris at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. In these Paris years she also become associated with the French intellectuals and philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Herrera began to refine her hard edge, non-objective style during this time period, although, as Whitney Curator Dana Miller comments, her work still contained “a lot of vibrancy and life," as well as an “almost spiritual quality." Her style at the time has been retrospectively compared to the work of Ellsworth Kelly, who was also working in Paris during these years, but who received far more publicity.

In 1950, Herrera made a return trip to Cuba where she painted a series of highly gestural abstract paintings. The works produced on this trip were reflective of contemporary developments in abstraction and have a style and color palette that is not seen again in Herrera's works. She attempted to display these works in a solo show in December 1950 in Havana at the Lyceum, but the audience was not receptive.

After her return to Paris, financial difficulties and her husband's inability to secure a job forced the couple to move back to New York in 1953. At the time of her return to New York, Herrera and others continued to develop a rational style. At this time she began to experiment with "the physical structure of the painting...paintings becoming an object." In this period, she also grew close to other postwar abstractionists, including Leon Polk Smith, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman.

Herrera continued creating without recognition until her late-life discovery, beginning in the early 2000s.

Late-life discovery[]

Carmen Herrera was not broadly recognized or appreciated for decades, selling her first piece of artwork at 89 years old. Prior to her recent shows at the Lisson Gallery and Whitney Museum, she had only one major show in 1984 at the now defunct Alternative Museum in New York.

Her close friend and advocate, the painter Tony Bechara, attended a dinner with Frederico Sève, the owner of the Latin Collector Gallery in Manhattan. Sève was in the process of developing a much-publicized show featuring female geometric painters, from which an artist had dropped out. Bechara recommended Herrera

Despite living in America for much of her life, publications writing about her recent rediscovery have often labeled her as a Cuban-American artist. Although proud of her heritage, Herrera has consciously avoided relating her work to a particular national or ethnic aesthetic. Even in times of Cuban turmoil, such as during the Cuban Revolution of the late 1950s, she consciously avoided a politicalization of her work

She had two major exhibitions of her work at Lisson Gallery (May-June 2016) & Whitney Museum (September 2016-January 2017)

Recent years[]

Due to her inability to walk, Herrera lived at home full-time with caretakers.

Herrera has remarked that it is the “beauty of the straight line” that keeps her going. She died in New York City, New York State, USA on 12 February 2022, at the age of 106 years, 257 days.

References[]

Artist Carmen Herrera turns 100 years old—artnet News
Carmen Herrera: 'Men controlled everything, not just art' The Guardian
A Mighty Girl - Happy 106th birthday to Cuban-American... Facebook
Carmen Herrera, Cuban-Born Artist Who Won Fame at 89, Dies at 106 - The New York Times (nytimes.com)