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Cuban-born artist Carmen Herrera, who had painted abstract geometric shapes in Paris and New York undetected for most of her long life, then rose to international fame when her canvases began selling at the age of 89, died Saturday in her London loft. Lower Manhattan, his home for 60 years. He was 106 years old.
Antonio Bechara, an artist and his friend and legal representative, confirmed his death.
In a world of art that worships the new and youthful, Miss Herrera has advanced into old age, being ignored by commercial markets, simply enjoying the solitary pleasures of all struggling artists, doing wonders for her own good.
Decades passed, then half a century. Patiently, his brushes rendered minimalist geometric configurations in stark black and white like visual haiku, and then in bright colors: triangles and trapezoids, sinuous seashells, rondos, and diamonds floating in a pristine white canvas universe.
In post-war Paris, Miss Herrera was exhibited at the Salon des Réalites Nouvelles, a venue for abstract artists. She found a place in New York’s shop windows, sidewalk shows, wherever she could see it. Years later, his work has been exhibited at the Alternative Museum in the East Village and El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem. There were small but positive reviews, but no buyers.
Still, Miss Herrera persevered. She lived frugally in the loft, hid her treasure trove of rolled canvases in closets, and continued to paint with the support of her husband Jesse Lowenthal, an English teacher at Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School, for 45 years until her death in 2000.
In 2004, Mr. Bechara recommended his work to Frederico Sève, a longtime advocate for Latin American artists and Brazilian-born owner of the Latin Collector’s Gallery on Hudson Street in TriBeCa, who organized a show for three Latinos.
In short review For The New York Times, Holland Cotter wrote: “This lively and handsome spectacle tackles a geometric thread of abstraction in 20th-century Latin American art and follows it through the work of three women who have made significant contributions to the history of this art. .
“The senior artist,” he continued, “is also the least known, Carmen Herrera, who was born in Cuba in 1915 and has lived in New York since 1954. She has contact with Mondrian, Ellsworth Kelly, and Op Art, but the closest At the same time, Lygia Clark and Helio Oititica It developed in Brazil after World War II.”
The reaction to the show was quick. Ella Fontanals-CisnerosA Cuban-born collector with an arts foundation in Miami purchased five of Mr. Herrera’s paintings. Estrellita Brodskyanother well-known collector bought five more. Agnes GundThe philanthropist and retired president of New York’s Museum of Modern Art also bought several and donated one of Ms. Herrera’s black-and-white paintings to MoMA, along with Mr. Bechara.
Acclaim in art publications and the general press followed solo exhibitions in New York and London. A traveling Herrera retrospective became a hit across Europe. His work was purchased for the permanent collections of MoMA, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, the Tate Modern in London, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Private collectors have also snatched his work. Reporters shouted for interviews.
The value of his paintings went up. By 2009 they were going up to $50,000 each, and by 2014 to $160,000 – amounts unimaginable when Ms. Herrera was in her 80s. The Observer of London described his work as the discovery of the decade, “How could we have missed these wonderful compositions?” she asked.
Most of his new money went to the helpers around the clock, keeping him in the studio-loft he had occupied for nearly fifty years at the time. “Money is useful because at the end of life, to my amazement, you need a lot of help,” he told The Telegraph of London. “Or I’ll end up in a nursing home. And that’s what I’m afraid of.”
At the age of 94, Giacometti was thin, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and Miss Herrera, with shoulder-length, bone-white hair, a gorgeous woman in a wheelchair, suffering from arthritis but still painting. How had she persevered after decades of obscurity?
“I do it because I have to; It is a compulsion that also gives me pleasure.” told The Times in 2009. “I’ve never had an opinion about money in my life, and I thought fame was a very rude thing. So I just worked and waited. And at the end of my life, I get a lot of recognition, for wonder and delight actually.”
Turning 100 years old in 2015, her status in the modern art canon was confirmed with the release of Alison Klayman’s half-hour documentary “The 100 Years Show” and the addition of two tracks by Miss Herrera, “Blanco y Verde.” ” (1959), as the Whitney Museum of American Art, opened its new home in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District with work by Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Agnes Martin, and Jasper Johns.
“It’s time,” Ms. Herrera told a reporter while drinking a whiskey on her rooftop on East 19th Street near Union Square. “There is a saying that if you wait for the bus, it will come. I waited almost a hundred years.”
In 2016, Miss Herrera was showered with praise when she opened “Lines of Sight,” an exhibition of 50 paintings focusing on the period between 1948 and 1978, in which Whitney developed her distinctive geometric abstractions, including a canvas with backgammon. -Like the long triangles with the title “A City” (1948).
“At 101, artist Carmen Herrera finally gets the show the art world should have given it 40 or 50 years ago: a solo exhibition at a major New York museum,” Karen Rosenberg told The Times. “The show presents him as an artist with tremendous discipline, coherence and clarity of purpose, and a key player in any history of postwar art.”
Carmen Herrera was born on May 31, 1915, in Havana, to Antonio Xavier Herrera and Carmen Nieto. His father was the founding editor of the Havana newspaper El Mundo and his mother was a reporter there. Carmen grew up in a prosperous and cultured home surrounded by art, music and literature. Among the visitors was Langston Hughes, poet and leader of the Harlem Renaissance.
He learned French and English and studied art in Havana, then went to Marymount International School in Paris for his secondary education. He later studied architecture at the University of Havana, but dropped out amid the turmoil surrounding the rise of military dictator Fulgencio Batista. She married Mr. Lowenthal, who was visiting Cuba from New York in 1939. They had no children; Mr. Bechara said that Ms. Herrera’s survivors were a niece and a nephew.
Ms. Herrera studied at the Art Students League for several years after she married and moved to New York. She and her husband then lived in Paris from 1948 to 1953, where she developed a style that included bold colors and sharply defined geometric shapes. His work has been exhibited with Josef Albers, Jean Arp and other post-war abstract artists.
But when he returned to New York in 1954, his vision of abstract geometric forms took a significant turn, becoming simpler in concept, often black and white, and gravitating towards a Minimalist style as opposed to a larger-than-life one. Abstract Expressionists whose broad gestures on canvas are becoming increasingly popular are the works of friends such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning.
“The prejudices some gallery owners held against women and Latin American artists put him at a disadvantage, as did the fact that his work, some of which prefigured later Op Art trends and strict Minimalism, was unable to keep up with modern art. John M. Cunningham wrote in a profile of Miss Herrera for the Encyclopedia Britannica.
But Miss Herrera followed her vision, and as her paintings did not sell, critics noticed what she had done.
In 1966 Hilton Kramer told the Times readers: “Within the confines of the geometric and hard-edge modes, a painter’s success often depends on accurately measuring what personal innovations are possible within the impersonal traditions of these styles. Miss Herrera understands this issue very well and is therefore able to offer something of her own.”
Forty years later, in 2005, Times critic Grace Glueck refine the point. “Abstractionist Carmen Herrera produces minimal yet meaningful paintings whose strength comes from intense fusions of color and ascetic form,” he wrote. “Over a long career, Miss Herrera has had a rare feat: she has succeeded in infusing her ascetic, normally impersonal art style with emotion and spirit.”
This career was recognized by the French government last July and was given the name Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. And just days before her death, Ms. Herrera learned that the National Gallery of Art in Washington had bought two of her works, Mr. Bechara said.
“She was very excited,” he said.
William McDonald contributed to the reporting.
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