The Black-and-White Paintings of Carmen Herrera

by Carolina Ponce de León

Carmen Herrera’s art is characterized by radiant planes of color counter posed in sharp, simple, and sophisticated geometric compositions. This exhibition, however, comprises only her black-and white paintings, executed in short sequences of two or three examples from the transitional stages between one chromatic series and the next. Working in black-and-white allows the artist to detach herself from the demands and seduction of color, and so to concentrate on the constructive elements of the image. Each sequence would be finished when she “felt the need for color arising anew.” 1 Executed between 1951 and 1989, these works reflect the development of her visual thinking and represent the ascetic and spiritual essence of the vocabulary.

Carmen Herrera’s artistic lineage is extensive. The classical feeling of her painting situates her work a geometric tradition that runs from the vanguard artists of the beginning of the century, such as Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, Theo van Doesburg, and Frank Stella. Her work also falls within the geometric currents that arose by 1934 with the Universalismo Constructivo of Joaquin Torres-García in Uruguay, and in 1945 and 1946, respectively, whith the Asociacion Arte Concreta-Invención and the Grupo Madí, in Argentina, seminal movements for the constructivist legacy in Latin America which developed fully at the continental level in the 1950s with such artists as Alejandro Otero (Venezuela), Lygia Clark (Brazil), Mathias Goeritz (Mexico), and Eduardo Ramirez Villamizar (Colombia). Despite the extensive affiliation of Carmen Herrera’s work, she distinguishes herself through a particular sensibility, as Hilton Kramer indicated in a 1965 review in the The New York Times:

Within the limits of the geometric and hard-edge modes, a painter’s success often depends on a correct gauging of what personal innovations are possible within the impersonal conventions of these styles. Miss Herrera shows a canny understanding of this problem, and is thus able to confer something distinctly her own on a pictorial realm now widely and expertly practiced.2

Three cultural worlds-Paris, New York, and Havana-intertwine in Carmen Herrera’s personal life and, in various forms, in the evolution of her work. She was born into a family of intellectuals in Havana, Cuba in 1915. Her father was the publisher of El Mundo, a newspaper in Havana, her mother, a journalist. As a young girl, she took private art lessons from J.F. Edelman, director of the Academia de San Alejandro in Havana, where Amelia Peláez (1896-1967), an early figure of modern painting in Cuba, studied. Because of the close friendship between the Peláez and Herrera families, Amelia was a constant presence in Carmen’s life. Though there is no formal connection between their painting their paths frequently cross; both women developed as artists in Paris of the early 1930s and were close to the avant-garde of the period; both had a brief sojourn at the Art Students League in New York (with no discernable impact on their work). Both females and Latin Americans, they shifted cultural milieus with the fluid, cosmopolitan spirit of modernism. Nonetheless, the difference between their pictorial styles reveals an important distinction: whereas Peláez incorporated vernacular elements into her work, Herrera maintained the non-referential parameters of concrete art.

In the early 1930s, Carmen Herrera completed her studies in painting and art history at Marymount College in Paris. That was an important period for concrete art, following international pioneering efforts such as the Cercle et Carre, founded in Paris in 1929 by Michel Seuphor and Joaquin Torres-García, joining soon after with Abstraction-Creation (1931-1936). Of different generations but similar artistic inclinations, Torres-García, Amelia Peláez, and Carmen Herrera were in Paris together at the beginning of the decade. The influences, direct and indirect, and the course upon which each was soon to embark, are a metaphor for the complex artistic genealogies that came into being among the European and American avant-gardes.

On her return to Cuba around 1935, Carmen Herrera entered the University of Havana School of Architecture. Although the social upheaval in Havana inhibited her ability to practice, the experience had a marked impact on the subsequent development of her work. The harmony, the study of proportion, the conception of space, and the abstract thought intrinsic to the discipline were concerns that evolved rapidly in her painting. In her architectural interest she coincides once again with Amelia Peláez and again the differences stand out: In Peláez’s work, Havana architecture has an intimate, decorative, voluptuous presence while a Herrera’s it is controlled, constructivist, and spare.

In the mid-1930’s Carmen Herrera participated in Havana’s vigorous cultural life as a member of an informal group of painters, poets, and writers life Alfredo Lozano and Cundo Bermúdez, who were organizing recitals, soirees, and exhibitions in the city. When she was twenty-three, she married Jesse Loewenthal with whom she went to New York in 1939. There she took classes for two or three years with the painter John Corvino at the Art Students League. Except for her admiration of the work of Georgia O’keeffe and Stuart Davis, this first phase in New York did not live up to her expectations of finding a provocative ambiance of modernist art. It was not until her return to Paris, where she lived from 1948 to 1954 that she found one that was artistically stimulating for her (curiously, Ellsworth Kelly who, like Carmen Herrera, painted his first hard-edge canvas in 1951, lived in Paris during that same period).

Paris remained the main center of European art after the war; though abstraction did not receive official recognition-which was partial toward the figuration of Piccaso, Matisse, and Balthus-it did obtain the backing of a small group of galleries and critics. With the Art Concret exhibition, organized by the Galerie Rene Drouin in 1945, the domain of the constructivist mode was strengthened; such artists as Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Wassily Kandinsky, Sophie Tauber-Arp, Jean Arp, and Antoine Pevsner were participants. This position was sustained by the Salon des Realites Nouvelles3 Organized annually by Fredo Sides (beginning in 1946) with the aim of showing abstract, concrete constructivist, and nonrepresentational currents banned as “decadent” by the Nazi regime during the German occupation. Carmen Herrera showed at this historic salon each year from 1949 to 1952. The international thrust of this event-bringing together artists from as many as eighteen countries-encouraged her to venture beyond the “romantic abstraction” that she feels predominated in her work of that period.4 She set out to achieve a purer mode, closer to the canons of concrete art.

We are inaugurating the period of pure painting by constructing the spirit form: The period of concretization of the creative spirit. Concrete painting, not abstract, because there is nothing more concrete than a line, a color, or a surface.5

The purpose was to eliminate all referential aspects, in the hope of foregrounding the autonomy of pictorial elements as reality itself.

Carmen Herrera’s first black-and-white works-Diagonal, Verticals, and untitled-were painted between 1951 and 1952 in Paris. In them, the contrast between planes virtually separated by a dividing line composed of opposing black and white stripes constitutes the basis of the painting’s surface organization. In these early works, Carmen Herrera brings the frontiers of line, form, and space into an ambiguous relation between negative and positive. The pictorial elements produce an optical rhythm that is a secondary, unintentional substratum. Her fundamental concern is to achieve a high degree of complexity through economy of resources. The precision of these paintings, the simplicity of their geometric structure, and the austere use of color prefigure not only the more simplified solutions of her subsequent work, but also anticipate optical and kinetic art and minimalist hard-edge painting which was in vogue in New York in the 1960’s with such artists as Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, and Leon Polk Smith.

In 1954, Carmen Herrera moved to New York when Abstract Expressionism was at its peak. Her new works modulated space on a basis of ambivalent relations of harmony and tension in which color plays a dominant role. Pictorial space is constructed upon two chromatic planes, optically divided by a subtle geometric pattern that combines symmetry and asymmetry, as in the case of Red on Red (1959). The color in her paintings is flat and solid in contradistinction to Barnett Newman’s or Mark Rothko’s modulated surfaces but, like theirs, conceives art as a meditated act in which a sense of order reigns:

The initial point of departure in my work is a process of organization that follows the dictates of reason. The visual execution is contained within the latitude allowed by the order so established. It is a process that must choose, among innumerable possibilities, the one that balances reason and visual execution.6

As in the case of many modernist painters, geometry evokes a spiritual dimension in Herrera’s work. While not sharing the interests of the Abstract Expressionists in the ritual will of primitive thought, her work displays a unity that developed over time like a personal meditation.7 It is a process of reflection that constantly revisits subtle problems of form, structure, color, and harmony. Although some of her works derive from personal experiences, the references are not explicit, as in Yesterday (1987), prompted by grief for two dead friends, or Escorial (1974), inspired by both the minimalist design for the Royal Palace of the Escorial in Madrid and the torture gridiron of Saint Lawrence. There is a dramatic affinity between the starkness and precision of these paintings and Zurbarán’s chiaroscuro, as well as the symbols of the seventeenth-century Spanish Catholic church. In this sense, despite the apparently impersonal aspect, color in her painting- including the black-and-white works-suggests emotional content.

In contrast with the more cosmopolitan experience of artistic life in Paris, Carmen Herrera found herself confronted on her return to New York by the disadvantages of being a woman artist and a Latin American. Although her work was favorably received by critics like Dore Ashton, Hilton Kramer, and Emily Genauer, she exhibited only sporadically. She had no more than four one-person shows between 1956 and 1985, the year in which the Alternative Museum of New York gave her a selected retrospective. Despite her intellectual affinity with close friends like Leon Polk Smith and Benjamin Bennot-a painter of Russian descent who was very influential on her-the benign neglect of women artists prior to the ascension of the feminist movement caused her to work in solitude. “All artists live in exile of one kind or another,” She says.8

Carmen Herrera’s personal exile caused her to occupy an ambivalent place in the context of both North American and Latin America art. She belongs, from various cultural and personal standpoints, to an international tradition. Yet at the same time, she remains isolated, faithful to a modernist mode which, in her individual case, went from being a shared cosmopolitan adventure to that of a vocation pursued in an intimate manner.

Balancing reason and harmony, Carmen Herrera raises her paintings to a zenith of asceticism and precision. In this sense, the black-and-white series speaks eloquently of the purity, subtlety, and control exercised by her vision throughout her career.

 

CAROLINA PONCE DE LEON
Curator
El Museo del Barrio

NOTES

1. Carmen Herrera, Interview by the author, 1997
2. Quoted in Carmen Herrera: A Retrospective 1951-1984 (New York: The Alternative
Museum, 1985), p. 6.
3. Moszynska, Anna, Abstract Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990), p. 120.
4. Carmen Herrera, Interview by author, 1997.
5. Wassily Kandinsky and Jean Arp, quoted in Kristine Stiles, “Geometric Abstraction”
In Stiles, Kristine and Peter Selz, ed., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art:
A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996),
P, 63.
6. Quoted in Carmen Herrera: A Retrospective 1951-1984 (New York: The Alternative
Museum, 1985), p. 4.
7. Hesse, Thomas, Barnett Newman (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1971) p.61
8. Interview in Artists in Exile: Carmen Herrera, prod. And dir. Ray Blanco, 30 min.,
Cutting Edge Entertainment, Inc., Plainfield, NJ., 1994.

 

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