Carmen Herrera (1915-2022) was a groundbreaking artist whose hard-edged abstractions were unparalleled at the time of their conception in the late 1940s. However, Herrera’s artwork only gained the attention it rightfully deserved when she turned ninety-three. Her first major solo show in New York City occurred when Herrera was nearly 101 years old. With Herrera’s recent death on February 12, 2022 in her home and studio in New York, we remember her remarkable life and work.
Herrera was born in Havana, Cuba where she studied architecture. When she immigrated to New York City in her 20s, she shifted her focus to painting. Herrera moved to Paris in 1948, where she developed an entirely abstracted, minimalist style of work that resulted in crisp, geometric canvases that defined her style going forward. Even though Herrera felt excluded from the commercial art scene during her five-year sojourn in Paris, she interacted with fellow American artists Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith, who were also creating geometric works. In Blanco y Verde, Herrera constructed a series of pressure points where green triangles meet the edge of the canvases. The result is a dynamic work that invites viewers to decipher the shifting relationships between color and form.
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In this series, E. Carmen Ramos, curator of Latino art, discusses the exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. This episode looks at the painting Blanco y Verde by Carmen Herrera. Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art presents the rich and varied contributions of Latino artists in the United States since the mid-twentieth century, when the concept of a collective Latino identity began to emerge. The exhibition is drawn entirely from the Smithsonian American Art Museum's pioneering collection of Latino art. It explores how Latino artists shaped the artistic movements of their day and recalibrated key themes in American art and culture.
E. CARMEN RAMOS: This is Carmen Herrera’s “Blanco y Verde” from 1960. Herrera moved the United States from Havana, Cuba in 1939 and formed part of a large generation of American artists who were interested in abstraction. Between 1948 and 1952, she lived in Paris and formed part of a large community of artists coming from all over the world who were interested in finding a new language to represent the modern experience. She developed a wide body of work, that was highly experimental and motivated by her interest in form, space and color. Many of her works, including “Blanca y Verde,” started out as sketches mapped out on paper mathematically in which she played with different forms and space.
This work comes from a large body of work composed of green triangles that pierce through white space. “Blanca y Verde” is a diptych. As you see, it’s divided in two canvases and what Herrera does, is she creates a series of what I like to call pressure points, where the points of the various triangles that we see throughout the canvas meet the edge or the center of a canvas to create a sense of instability and movement throughout the canvas as well as to suggest three-dimensional space. On the right-hand side for example, she places three triangles on the bottom side and going through the middle of the canvas. It appears as if this white edge has been butted and moved by their placement. On the other canvas, she paints a triangle at the bottom edge of the canvas that joins with this triangle to give the sense of the green form pushing the white form back into space.
Carmen Herrera has recently gained a significant amount of attention as a Latin American artist. By including her work in our collection we're able to show her rich links with American artists and especially with the development of minimalist and abstract art in the United States ever since the 1950s.
In this video from SAAM’s 2013 exhibition, Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, former curator E. Carmen Ramos looks at Herrera’s diptych painting, Blanco y Verde. Ramos notes, “She developed a wide body of work, that was highly experimental and motivated by her interest in form, space and color. Many of her works, including Blanco y Verde, started out as sketches mapped out on paper mathematically in which she played with different forms and space.”
Carmen stands in front of artworks that inspired her early on. From "In Awe of the Straight Line," the comic about artist Carmen Herrera. All illustrations by Ezra Gaeta.
Carmen Herrera is one of ten artists we chose to include in SAAM’s recent comic series, Drawn to Art: Ten Tales of Inspiring Women Artists. Herrera’s artistic life was marked by the challenges of being a woman artist at a time when the art world was dominated by men. In fact, she was told by one gallery dealer that they could not show her work because she was a woman. She never gave up, and, when she was well into her eighties, began to garner the attention of collectors, gallerists, and museums.
The comic takes its title from a remark Herrera once made in reference to her painting: “I believe that I will always be in awe of the straight line. Its beauty is what keeps me painting.”
Sir Isaac Julien’s moving image installation "Lessons of the Hour" interweaves period reenactments across five screens to create a vivid picture of nineteenth-century activist, writer, orator, and philosopher Frederick Douglass.
