Carmen Herrera, Cuban painter and architect who achieved fame when she was already an old woman, died on Sunday at her home in New York at 106 years, announced the Lisson gallery that represented her from London.
“It is with immense sadness that we announce the death of Carmen (…) She died peacefully in her sleep in her New York studio-apartment where she lived and worked from 1967, most of that time with her husband Jesse Lowenthal, who also died at home in 2000”, the gallery wrote in its obituary.
The The New York Times highlighted yesterday that Herrera “painted in the dark for decades”, in which she lived off the income of her husband, an English teacher, and stressed that her leap to true fame was not produced up to 2004.
Herrera sold his first painting to 90 years and, despite having gone unnoticed for decades, his works are now are exhibited at the MoMA in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and London’s Tate Galerie.
Trained in her native Havana as an architect in the years 550 and 39, completed his artistic education in Paris, Rome and Berlin, cities where he lived the emergence of the avant-garde, particularly in the French capital, where he lived between 1948 and 1954.
In that year, he moved to New York, and befriended artists such as Mark Rothko and Barbara Hepworth, while developing his minimalist style of geometric abstraction, characterized by a very precise palette of only two or three colors in each composition.
“There is nothing I love more than a straight line, how can I explain it? It is truly the beginning of any structure (…) Someone told me one day that I will paint a point and I will have finished”, he joked on one occasion, quoted the agency EFE.
According to her gallery, Herrera was saved and condemned at the same time by her refusal to embrace any movement , even the one that was naturally closest to him, the minimalism of the 70 years of the last century, “ dominated by men”, because that rejection “left her free to experiment in her own way”.
“The core of Carmen Herrera’s painting is an impulse for formal simplicity and a surprising sense of color ”, summed up the Lisson gallery. “A master of sharp lines and contrasting planes of color, Herrera creates symmetry, asymmetry, and an infinite variety of movement, rhythm, and spatial tension on canvas.” In 2009 the newspaper The Observer of London asked rhetorically: “How is it possible that we have we lost these beautiful compositions?”, recalled NBC News.
In an art world that worships the new and the young, Carmen Herrera advanced into old age ignored by the commercial markets. But that all changed with a gallery show in 2004. https://t.co/DXTFW4BWK3— New York Times Arts (@nytimesarts) February , 2022