NEW YORK, Feb. 14 (BUS): Cuban-born artist Carmen Herrera, whose radiant color and geometric palettes remained for decades before the art world took notice, dies. She was 106 years old.
Artist Antonio Bishara told the New York Times that Herrera died at her Manhattan home, the Associated Press reported.
Fame finally came at the age of 89, when Herrera sold her first paintings in 2004.
It may have taken Herrera 60 years to discover, but today her paintings – the simple compositions of straight lines, shape and color – are in the permanent collections of major museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate Modern in London.
“The essence of Carmen Herrera’s painting is the impulse to formal simplicity and a striking sense of color,” according to the Leeson Gallery in London. Characterized by clear lines and contrasting chromatic levels, Herrera creates symmetry, asymmetry and an endless array of movement, rhythm, and spatial tension across the painting.
In 2009, the Observer of London asked, “How can we miss these beautiful compositions?”
Herrera said she painted because she had to.
“It’s a compulsion that makes me happy too. I’ve never in my life had any idea about money and thought fame was a very cliched thing. She said in a 2009 interview…
Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1915, Herrera was the daughter of the founding editor-in-chief of the Havana-based newspaper El Mundo and a mother who was a reporter.
She studied architecture at a university in Havana, and traveled frequently between Cuba and Paris during the 1930s and 1940s. She trained at the Art Students League in New York where she settled in the mid-1950s after her marriage to Jesse Lowenthal, a literature teacher at Stuyvesant High School. He died in 2000.
She said that working as an artist in post-war America was a difficult challenge.
“People weren’t ready to take my business,” Herrera told The Observer in 2010. She remembered how the owner of the avant-garde New York gallery frankly told her: “Carmen, you can draw circles around the male artists I own but I won’t give you a show because you’re a woman.”
But, she said, being a little-known artist has its advantages; This means that she can work to please herself, not to please anyone else.
In the late 2000s she had solo exhibitions at the Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern in Germany and the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, and a decade earlier at the Museo del Barrio in New York.
Herrera art is also found in several other museums including the Hirshhorn Museum and the Smithsonian American Museum of Art in Washington, as well as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.