New York
Grandma Moses she is not. Rather than painting heartwarming depictions of a mythic American hinterland, Carmen Herrera has fashioned some of the most severe examples of hard-edge abstraction ever conceived. What she shares with Grandma Moses, however, is that now, with a show at the Whitney, she has finally found fame at the age of 101.
Herrera started painting in her twenties, rather than in her seventies like Moses, and she has always had some admirers. But it is only now, after decades of being depreciated and ignored as a Cuban artist, or a woman artist, that she is finally receiving the recognition she deserves. As of this writing, she has lived about half-a-year longer than Grandma Moses and she is still going strong. From an apartment on East 19th Street in Lower Manhattan, her home for nearly a half-century, Herrera still makes art every day (although she now relies on studio hands to carry out her ideas) and she still cultivates that cerebral idiom that has defined her career since the late 1940s.
Carmen Herrera was born in Havana in 1915 into an affluent and highly cultured family. At first, she wanted to become an architect, then she tried her hand at sculpture, and only gradually did she resolve upon a career as a painter. In 1939, she married Jesse Loewenthal, a New Yorker and high school English teacher who would remain her constant companion for more than 60 years until his death, in 2000, at the age of 98.
Although they were never wealthy, his steady employment made it possible for them to live in Paris for several years in the early 1950s, and they were on intimate terms with many of the important figures in the New York art world. Throughout this period, Herrera produced paintings and took part in group shows and received appreciative notice from Hilton Kramer, among other critics. This Whitney exhibition, though sizable, is not a retrospective: It contains no paintings or sculptures from before 1948 or anything after 1978. As such, the curators have chosen, a little arbitrarily, to confine themselves to the years when Herrera’s work coincided with the mainstream of contemporary art.
In the earliest works in the exhibition, when she is still finding her way, Herrera allows herself the indulgence of curves, and even a trace of content. Paintings like Iberic and The Vision of Saint Sebastian, both from 1949, retain inscrutable traces of symbols. The looping lines of Les Liens, from the same year, and the Habana Series from two years later, invoke the biomorphic abstraction that predominated at that time.
Soon thereafter, however, Herrera began to evolve the art with which she is most associated, an art of the purest Euclidean geometry. And on the evidence of this exhibition, she has not produced a single curved line in over 50 years. Still, her geometry is different from Barnett Newman’s surly walls of color or the sullen grids of Ad Reinhardt: There is an impish busyness to her irregular, asymmetrical masses, and to her wedges, which have been refined down to the head of a needle.
Sometimes her paintings are sequences of serried black-and-white lines of varied width. At other times they are a composite of smaller canvases combined like so many pieces of origami. At that point, they are halfway toward being the sculptures that, in a few cases, they actually become. As often as not, however, it is the sheer force of color that carries these paintings. Many of Herrera’s works are conceived in pure and primary colors; and even when they are not, even when they consist of shades and half-tones, their sustained immediacy conveys all the elemental force of primary colors.
It is one of the privileges of the hard-edged style in which she works that, at its best, it seems to enjoy eternal youth. To the practiced eye, of course, her colors and forms are specific to a determined time and place in the history of art, the art of America in the postwar years. But one forgets that specificity as one stands before works like Green and White, from 1956, and Green and Orange (1958), two paintings that are quite perfect in their way. Perhaps these works will one day seem old, but more than a half-century has already passed and that has not happened.
It is one of the sad truths about artists and cultural figures in general that, all too often, they are recognized only after their deaths. Schubert, Austen, Melville, and van Gogh—not to mention a thousand others—all breathed their last in the morbid certainty that (to quote Sir Thomas Browne) they “must be content to be as though they had not been.” Mahler might assert that “Meine Zeit wird kommen” (“My time will come”), and Keats could hope to be “among the English Poets after my death.” But they experienced such hopes more as wishful thinking than anything else.
That was the fate—or so it seemed—reserved for Carmen Herrera. But then, improbably and against all the odds, she went on living, long enough to outlast even the indifference of the world. For once, she was there to see justice finally done.
James Gardner’s latest book is Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City.
