Though the Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera, who has died aged 106, spent 70 years refining her painting style into a severe yet seductive form of geometric abstraction, her pioneering work remained largely unrecognised by the art world until she was in her early 90s. From thereon, however, it received popular acclaim, with myriad museum exhibitions dedicated to the artist’s paintings and occasional forays into sculpture. Her work, she said in 2005, has been a “lifelong process of purification, a process of taking away what isn’t essential”.
The artist was an early adopter of an aesthetic that has an affinity to American colour field painting, op art and Latin American neo-concretism. A typical Herrera painting does no more than balance two planes of contrasting colour across a large canvas. Each work in the Blanco y Verde series (1959-71), for example, is painted uniformly white in acrylic, bar the imposition of one or several green triangles, each with slight variations in acuteness, which stretch the width or length of the composition.
The artist rejected painting as intuitive practice. Her paintings were carefully planned through scale drawings on tracing paper, complete with annotated measurements, which would later be replicated in acrylic on canvas. Her later work became sharper, more angular. Curves were banished. “I never met a straight line I did not like,” she noted in 2010.
Herrera also made human-scale wood sculptures. Stylistically echoing the acrylic works, these tended to balance multiple parts, painted a flat primary colour monochrome, into simple geometric arrangements. Untitled (1971), now part of the collection at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, consists of a rectangular block of wood, over a metre in height and width, yet just eight centimetres deep, on top of which is balanced a smaller rectangular wood block, similar in depth, and likewise painted royal blue. In later years she moved into public works, which she titled Estructuras Monumentales, her abstract compositions rendered in monochromatically painted aluminium.
Despite a lifetime’s dedicated practice, Herrera was 89 when her big break came. In 2004, a fellow artist, Tony Bechara, ran into the New York dealer Frederico Sève at a dinner. Sève mentioned that one of the exhibitors had withdrawn from what was supposed to be a three-woman show he was curating of Latin American geometric abstraction. Bechara recommended Herrera as a replacement.
Sève sold several of Herrera’s works off the back of the show, with the prominent New York collector and philanthropist Agnes Gund buying several and donating one to the Museum of Modern Art. That work, a large hypnotic black and white striped painting from 1952, was put on display in the 2007 survey exhibition New Perspectives in Latin American Art.
In 2009 Herrera had a solo show at the Ikon gallery in Birmingham, piquing the interest of the gallerist Nicholas Logsdail. His gallery, Lisson, showed Herrera’s work for the first time in London in 2012, and inaugurated a New York space with an exhibition by the artist in 2016, the same year the Whitney Museum staged a retrospective.
Born in Havana, Herrera was the second child of Carmela Nieto y Font and Antonio Herrera y López de la Torre. Her father was the founding editor of El Mundo, a progressive newspaper, her mother a journalist. Herrera was raised alongside her mother’s five children from a previous marriage. Antonio and Carmela were outspoken in their politics, Herrera’s mother ingraining a feminist attitude into her and her two half-sisters from a young age.
As the Cuban general Gerardo Machado, elected president in 1925, grew increasingly despotic in his second term of office, Herrera’s parents largely evaded persecution. However many of her relatives, including two of her half-brothers, were harassed and imprisoned.
In 1929, at the age of 14, Herrera left Cuba for finishing school in Paris, the first of several trips over her life to the French capital. Returning to Havana in 1931 she took a sculpture course at the Lyceum, a women’s college, building on the private tutelage she had received when aged eight from the painter Federico Edelmann y Pinto.
Those early exercises in sketching classical sculpture served her well.The first work she exhibited, Cristo, in 1937, consisted of a tearful mahogany-carved Christ set on a mount bearing a swastika. It was part of a group exhibition in a public park – the art was hung from trees; Herrera was “the spirit” behind the show according to one critic.
The same year she met Jesse Loewenthal, an English teacher visiting from the US, and their courtship continued after Loewenthal returned home.
In 1938 she enrolled on an architecture course at the Universidad de La Habana. “Modern architecture was interesting to me. I loved spaces, shapes, and lines,” she said in an interview with Artnet in 2016. However, she was forced to abandon her studies after a year due to the volatile political situation. “There were always revolutions going on, and fighting in the streets. The university was closed most of the time, so it affected my studies,” she said in a Guardian interview in 2016.
Fulgencio Batista came to power for the first time in 1940 (having served four years democratically he would return in 1952 to establish a US-backed dictatorship), establishing a semblance of stability, but by then Herrera had left Havana to be reunited with Loewenthal in New York. They married in 1939.
In the US Herrera took an apprenticeship with the Austrian-born painter Samuel Brecher. Despite her teacher’s adherence to realism, Herrera made tentative steps towards abstraction. Two surviving early portraits, one of a male figure, another a female, make use of blocks of colour delineating parts of the bodies and background.
From 1943 to 1947 she studied at the Art Students League in New York, but was increasingly dissatisfied with the traditional approach of her teachers. She later noted that her friendship with the abstract artist Barnett Newman and his wife, Annalee, proved the greater education. “He had such incredible insight into the artist,” she said. “And that was the best university you could have.”
In 1948 Herrera and Loewenthal moved to Paris. Living on the Left Bank in Montparnasse, she made contact with Sonia Delaunay, Jean Arp and other prominent figures of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. It was under their influence that Herrera dropped the lingering remnants of figuration. “It was a struggle,” she noted in a 2010 interview with the Guardian of this development in her art. “An interesting struggle.”
In 1950 she had her first solo show, back at the Lyceum in Havana, where she showed a series of large, angry, gestural paintings, works which she described as a reaction against her home city. The artist noted that the reception from the local audience was largely negative.
Green Garden (1950), made back in Paris, was the last of Herrera’s work that had any subject other than the formal devices of geometry and colour. Framed against a brown background were curving organic forms in a variety of green tones. The canvas was stretched around a circular frame, the first of many irregular shaped paintings.
Iberic, painted a year later, took similar form, but this time, bar unity in the autumnal, burnished red, orange and black interlocking shapes, it bore not the slightest allusion to figuration.
The couple returned to New York in 1954. Herrera then stayed in the US, despite the lack of attention afforded her work. Two years later she had a solo exhibition and work included in two group shows, both of which focused on Cuban art, something that irritated her. “I don’t believe the ‘Cuban painter’ exists,” she later stated. “The artist is universal.”
Between 1958 and 1962 she did not exhibit at all and she and her husband struggled financially. Fidel Castro assumed power in 1959 and rent payments from a family property in Havana failed to get through. Herrera made efforts to bring some of her family’s more valuable belongings to New York and put them up for sale. A year later her brother Antonio was given a 22-year prison sentence for “anti-revolutionary activity”.
For the next four decades she fell into a cycle of occasional small solo exhibitions and only slightly more frequent participation in groups shows. In the late 1960s she was awarded two fellowships from the Cintas Foundation and in 1977 a grant by the Creative Artists Public Service, but Herrera and Loewenthal sought out a cheap neighbourhood so they could live solely on his teaching salary.
From 1988 to 2005 she managed only a single solo show, at El Museo del Barrio, New York, an exhibition of her black and white paintings from the 1950s. She blamed her lack of success unequivocally on sexism. She recalled being explicitly told that while she was a great painter, a gallerist could not give her a show because of her gender. “Everything was controlled by men,” she noted. “Not just art.”
Now Herrera’s work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian and the Hirshhorn museums in Washington; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Tate Modern in London; and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana; as well as MoMa, the Whitney and the Walker. In 2019 her public sculpture was shown in City Hall Park in New York, moving to Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston in 2020 to coincide with a retrospective at the city’s Museum of Fine Arts. In 2019 she was made an honorary Royal Academician, the French government awarding her the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres the following year.
“I was left alone to refine and distil my art for decades,” she said of her late-starting career. “I have no regrets.”
Loewenthal died in 2000.
• Carmen Herrera, artist, born 31 May 1915; died 12 February 2022
