January 8, 2010

Shaping Up, Art News

After seven decades as a little-known painter of pared-down abstractions, Carmen Herrera finds a place in the spotlight

BY ANN LANDI - “Being an artist in the ’40s was like suicide,” Carmen Herrera says, without rancor. “Nobody paid any attention to women. The men always found a place, but the women had to fight, and they did fight—very, very hard.”
In her modestly furnished Chelsea loft, serenely planted in front of bookshelves crammed with volumes by writers ranging from Balzac to E. E. Cummings, the Cuban-born artist, now 95, speaks in a slightly accented, matter-of-fact voice about the path she has traveled. The world has been slow to take note of her pared-down, highly cerebral paintings, but she talks mostly about how difficult it was to get attention as a woman in the male-dominated New York gallery scene of the ’40s and ’50s.

She remembers one dealer in particular, Rose Fried, who came to her studio and praised her work as “wonderful, marvelous,” but told her point-blank, “Carmen, I want you to know that you can paint circles around the artists I have, but I’m not giving you a show, because you are a woman. The men have families to support.”

Long before encountering that level of rejection, though, Herrera had set her own stubborn course and achieved a measure of success in both Paris and Cuba. Born in 1915, she was the daughter of forward-thinking Havana intellectuals. Her father, Antonio Herrera y López de la Torre, was the founding editor of El Mundo, the first newspaper established after Cuba won its independence from Spain. Her mother, Carmela Nieto de Herrera, was a married journalist with five children when she left her husband, an American financier, for Antonio. With him, she had two more children, of whom Carmen was the younger.

“I was brought up by men,” she says, referring to her older brothers, “because my mother was terribly busy all the time.” As a child, she absorbed a fair amount of academic training from an art teacher, and in 1930, when she was 15, her mother sent her to Paris to study painting and art history at Marymount College. Back in Cuba a year later, she formed a friendship with the artist Amelia Peláez, whom she credits with opening her eyes to the possibility of being both an artist and a woman.

Nonetheless it was tough to get an education in her home country. “There were a lot of revolutions—and I mean bloody revolutions,” Herrera says. “The universities and high schools were closed, but I went to a place called the Lyceum, which was a kind of club that a couple of women had started.” Here she attended lectures by eminent Spanish émigrés and pursued sculpture, especially wood carving. In 1937 she exhibited the mahogany Cristo in a major survey of Cuban artists organized by the Ministry of Culture. The following year, she began to study architecture at the University of Havana, but political turmoil intervened once more, and she soon left. Although she claims she didn’t learn enough to make a difference, her later work displays a deep interest in structure and architectonic thinking.

That same year, she met Jesse Lowenthal, a German Jew from the Bronx and a friend of her brother Antonio. “We were young, and the hormones kicked in,” she says, but they also shared a passion for books, and Lowenthal, in the depths of the Depression, had a secure job as a teacher at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in New York. After they married, in 1939, he took her to the city.

For the next ten years, Herrera pursued her path as a painter, studying at the Art Students League and making mostly figurative work, which she later destroyed. The couple’s circle of friends included the poet Louis Zukofsky and Barnett Newman. “He was a brilliant man,” she says of Newman. “When I met him, he couldn’t paint, he couldn’t do anything. He had a marvelous wife who told him, ‘Okay, I married an artist. If you’re not an artist anymore, let’s get a divorce.’ He went back to working.”

In 1948 Lowenthal and Herrera moved to Paris, which was once again a cultural center that attracted artists and writers from all over the world. There were many exhibitions devoted to Concrete art and other manifestations of abstraction, and Herrera began to cultivate her reductive style. Art supplies were sometimes so scarce that she painted on horse blankets. She brought one rather cluttered geometric canvas to Fredo Sidès, the director of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, who told her, “You know, in that painting you have many paintings.” She was pleased at what she thought was a compliment until she realized he was telling her to tone it down.

“The hardest thing was to move away from all the academic training I had had,” she recalls. But in a series of black-and-white paintings that anticipated Op art and in biomorphic abstractions featuring just a few colors, Herrera was creating work as radical as Ellsworth Kelly’s at the time (the two never met in Paris, where Kelly was also an expat, but they did have one encounter back in the United States in the early ’60s). Like Kelly, as critics would later recognize, she found a way to fuse color and shape. She exhibited steadily in Paris and in Havana, where she was lauded as the first Cuban artist to develop and sustain a pure abstract style.

After six years, however, Lowenthal ran out of sabbatical extensions, and straitened finances sent the couple back to New York. After one solo show at Galería Sudamericana and participation in a group show of Cuban artists, Herrera hit a wall of rejection and did not exhibit between 1957 and 1962. Nonetheless some of her most iconic works—Blanco y verde,
Untitled (Blue with White Stripe), and Green and Orange—date from these years. While Lowenthal taught, Herrera painted.
Interest in her work picked up during the ’60s, but by and large her paintings were relegated to exhibitions of Latin
American artists. A show called “Women Choose Women” at the former New York Cultural Center (its building now houses the Museum of Arts and Design) brought her briefly into the limelight in 1973, but it wasn’t until 1984, when she was 69, that her first retrospective took place, at the Alternative Museum in New York.

In the past two decades, Herrera has enjoyed increased recognition and several solo exhibitions, including a survey at El Museo del Barrio in 1998 of the black-and-white paintings she made during the ’50s. A retrospective at the Ikon gallery in Birmingham, England, last summer was her first solo exhibition in Europe and prompted one enthusiastic critic to write, “Carmen Herrera is the discovery of the year—of the decade. It would be hard to overstate the surprise of seeing her radiant paintings for the first time.” (The exhibition is at the Museum Pfalzgalerie in Kaiserslautern, Germany, through May 2.) She is now represented by Frederico Sève Gallery/latincollector in New York, where her large canvases sell for $60,000 to $65,000.

The hardest blow in recent years was the loss of her husband of 61 years, in 2000. “I was spoiled, because I lived with someone I loved and respected,” Herrera says. “It was so nice to be married to a very intelligent man. Imagine being married to somebody stupid? I would not have lasted a week.” She spends her days reading voraciously (she particularly likes the Times Literary Supplement) and drawing. “Some people take up embroidery. I’ve taken up drawing,” she says.

Although Herrera has been under the radarfor much of her life, she has few complaints. “Resentment, no,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s not in my nature. Disappointment, yes. But at the end of my life, here I am”—she smiles— “selling like crazy.” _

–Carmen Herrera. The 95-year-old artist’s spare, cerebral paintings are once again finding an audience. Photo: Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu/
Courtesy Frederico Sève Gallery/Latincollector, New York

Ann Landi is a contributing editor of ARTnews.