It’s a sadly common tale: Grand talent gets little promotion and support for the simple reason that it was forged by a woman. Fortunately, a serendipitous Google search can now correct such grievous gender bias. Which is what happened when curator Nigel Prince, during his stint with London’s Ikon Gallery, thought he was performing a search for Venezuelan artist Arturo Herrera, but the fiercely formalist paintings of Cuban-born Carmen Herrera appeared on-screen instead. Bowled over, Prince went on a steeplechase to locate the nonagenarian and dedicated his Pinta London booth to her. Toward the fair’s end, a dapper man persuaded the staff to pull the work back out of its crates as it was being packed. It was dealer Nicholas Logsdail, who asked to keep the paintings for a few months, then quickly placed them in collectors’ hands.
Logsdail brought Herrera into his heavily male fold at Lisson Gallery and has prominently featured her work for the past three years. In winter 2010-11, her stark canvases were juxtaposed with those of Peter Joseph. The following year a solo show provided a retrospective of paintings from the 1940s onward, and last year saw an exhibition of her recent works on paper. Lisson has also had great success with her works at fairs—a Herrera canvas was the first to sell at the gallery’s booth at this year’s Armory Show, going for $160,000—a bit of a change for an artist whose work hadn’t seen much movement from 1950 until 2005, when Miami collector Ella Fontanals-Cisneros bought five pieces. The artist, who turns 99 on May 31, is preparing for a centennial exhibition at Lisson in London, slated for May 2015.
“I never saw a straight line I didn’t like,” says Herrera, sitting in a self-imposed wheelchair in her New York home and studio beside two recently completed six-foot paintings with symmetrical sky-blue and white shapes. “I am very happy, but I would like to paint bigger,” she says. She is contemplating making it a triptych or even tetraptych. She forged her style in the 1930s—well before American Minimalism and outside Brazilian Constructivism, the movement championed by Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel that is currently being reexamined in gallery and museum exhibitions. “I have pictorial ideas,” Herrera explains. “There is a clarity and simplicity to geometry.” When one examines Tondo: Black and White, 1952, a composition of intersecting demilunes, or Blanco y Verde, 1959, a slip of a green triangle on a white field that was recently purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the conviction of her painting is clear.
Herrera stretches the theme of hard-edge geometries into different variations, often inspired by soul or wit, with titles offering clues to deeper meaning. Ayer, 1987, painted as a pair with La hora, also 1987, features a black canvas with a jagged white line—time, she says. The pieces compose a memorial to a couple with whom Herrera was close friends. After both men received a diagnosis of AIDS in the early years of the epidemic, they committed suicide together. More obvious is Escorial, 1974, so called for two reasons. “One, because it was a garbage dump and now it is a royal palace,” says the artist of the location in Madrid. “And even more fun, El Escorial was designed as a symbol of Saint Lawrence, who was barbecued.” The artist, who once dreamed of being an architect, points with her wand-like fingers to the image, in which black rectangles are situated against white in an architectural grid. “And this,” she says slyly, “is a grill.”
“Before I start the drawing, I imagine what it will look like if it is yellow here, blue there, or yellow there and green here,” she says of a method devoid of digital aids. “Then I try the colors out, and the one I like better is the one I use.” From plotting to completion, the process to make a painting takes about three to four weeks. After sketching, she selects a drawing to explore, then paints the color scheme she’s debating on paper, and then decides whether to commit to canvas. “I like to juxtapose shapes and colors until they tell me to stop. Then I know I have a painting,” she says. “The only thing that stops me is the frame.” Herrera has been painting since her 20s. “A woman at that time was nothing. They wouldn’t look at your work,” she says. That reaction checkered her early career. “I thought she was going to make me a show since she was so ecstatic about my work,” says the artist of New York gallerist Rose Fried. “But she said, ‘Carmen, I have to tell you the truth, you can paint round and round the men I have, but I’m not going to give you a show because you are a woman.’ I realized then how terrible discrimination is.”
Alas, “I was driven,” Herrera chuckles. “And my husband said, ‘Either paint or don’t.’” That is exactly what Herrera does. “Every morning, I go to my drawing table,” she says. Her home studio is populated by an ever-rotating cast of canvases, often settled between her sun-soaked desk area and her kitchen and dining room, where her drawings hang for her to contemplate over a meal on a long walnut table. The top-floor live-work space also serves as a location for shoots with filmmaker Alyson Klayman for an upcoming documentary. Her 19th Street neighbors have included such fellow artists as Barnett Newman, Leon Polk Smith, Stephen Shore, and currently the chair of El Museo del Barrio, Tony Bechara. “She’s a conservative Cuban lady,” says Bechara of the artist, who holds her own with men not only in the exhibition arena but also at the afterparty. His role as her best friend since the 1960s has expanded to that of de facto business manager—it was he who unwrapped Herrera’s paintings for Logsdail.
She has lived in her residence since 1968, sharing it with her husband, Jesse Lowenthal, a German Jew from the South Bronx who taught literature at Stuyvesant High School. (Lowenthal was featured in colleague and novelist Frank McCourt’s memoir Teacher Man: “What he did with a sentence and a piece of chalk would stun you.”) The two met and married while he was on a trip to Havana in 1938, and she uprooted her life to live with him in New York. The couple remained inseparable until Lowenthal died in 2000. “We became closer and closer, and by the end we were one person,” Herrera recalls.
Artistically, “I have never been influenced by anybody alive,” she contends, although she nods allegiance to Frank Lloyd Wright and the Bauhaus. She also notes her fondness of certain artists: Francisco de Zurbarán, Piet Mondrian, Georgia O’Keeffe, Stuart Davis, and Ben Nicholson, along with Polk Smith and Newman, who were her close friends.
She loves to tell the story about the time “Barney” applied for a position teaching art at Stuyvesant with Lowenthal, whom he befriended at City College. “He couldn’t pass the exam!” Herrera recounts gleefully. “Annalee [his wife] said, ‘When I married you, you were a painter, not a teacher. If you become a teacher, I’m out!’” Ironically, the artists, who had breakfast together every morning for years, “never talked about painting”—perhaps a clue as to why she eschews any association with other artists’ practices. “I don’t have any books about Picasso in my house. They’re dangerous because he’s so powerful,” she says of his extensive influence. “Before you know it, you’re doing a Picasso.”
Herrera’s father founded El Mundo, the Havana- based newspaper, and her reporter mother operated a perfume business on the side. “I don’t know why I was born in Cuba,” the artist remarks. “I should have been born in Paris.” In fact, she was a high school student in Paris at the Marymount School before returning to Havana after the stock market crash of 1929. Before being ripped from the French capital, she often could be found in Montmartre watching Edith Piaf, Josephine Baker (“Magnificent, and also indecent! She was on the stage almost naked”), or Carlos Gardel (“The women were crazy about him. The only problem was that he was a little bit gay”).
Returning to Cuba during a period of tumult, which saw the overturning of one dictator, Gerardo Machado, for another, Fulgencio Batista, Herrera never completed her studies. However, when not bailing her five brothers out of jail for political dissent, she painted and had her first major exhibition in 1937. The works were hung on trees in Havana’s Parque de Albear. Amid a sea of male artists, Herrera offered a depiction of Christ’s head on a swastika, rare in her oeuvre for its political and figurative content. Another participant was Wifredo Lam, a once-close friend who turned on her when she asked him to repay one of the many favors she had done him, including smuggling canvases into the United States.
Herrera in 1937 [Courtesy of Kristen Larsen]
Herrera and Lowenthal lived in Paris from 1948 to 1953. There she continued to develop her style, including Black and White, 1952, optical black-and-white stripes that form triangles, now held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 1949 to 1952, Herrera’s work was included in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, a juried survey of abstraction in Europe. Participation was a turning point for Herrera. “In order to be in Réalités Nouvelles, you had to bring your work to a group of people who would decide if they will take it or not,” she explains. “I went to show the work, and this guy said, ‘I like it very much, madame. There are many paintings here, but there is too much in one painting.’ And that was the beginning of the awakening process.”
In Paris, the couple socialized with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and showed American friends like Mark Rothko around town. “I’ve never met anyone so depressed,” Herrera says of Rothko. “We tried everything! Take him to the theater, to dinner, to our house to show him how an artist lived—no reaction to anything. Completely like he was in black.”
Back in New York, Willem de Kooning, Philip Pavia, Newman, and Rothko “had no reaction to my work” she says. “I didn’t go for what they were doing. They didn’t want to know what I was doing. A Cuban? A woman? Feh.” But Herrera did manage to be seen over the decades, with a solo retrospective at the Museo del Barrio in 1989 and gallery shows with Frederico Seve and Francisco Cisneros. Perhaps such adversity has driven Herrera’s practice. “It’s the only thing in this world that in my whole long life I have a power over,” she exclaims, banging the table with her fists. “My husband, my friends, nobody gives me any poder. Not even my cat pays attention to me!” Bechara gasps. “I’ve never heard her say that before.” Time has a way of outing the truth. But it looks like finally, in her 10th decade, the attention is flooding in, buoying her star.
A version of this article appears in the June 2014 issue of Art+Auction magazine.
