The abstract painter sidelined by sexism
Carmen Herrera 1915–2022
Carmen Herrera was a pioneering artist decades before the world knew it. The Cuban-born painter once exhibited alongside giants such as Piet Mondrian and won admirers for what she called “a lifelong process of purification, a process of taking away what isn’t essential.” But Herrera remained a relative unknown until she was nearly 90—and not only because she was painting dramatic, hard-edged abstractions at a time when messy abstract-expressionist explosions were in vogue. In the 1950s, even the rare female gatekeeper in the male-dominated art establishment refused to take a chance on her. In 2010, Herrera recalled the words of an avant-garde art dealer. “She said, ‘You know, Carmen, you can paint circles around the men artists that I have, but I’m not going to give you a show because you’re a woman.’ I felt as if someone had slapped me on the face.”
The daughter of a feminist journalist and the founding editor of the Havana newspaper El Mundo, Herrera “grew up in a prosperous and cultured household,” said The New York Times. She studied architecture at the University of
Havana in the late 1930s, but political instability cut her studies short. After a six-year sojourn in Paris, she moved to New York in 1954, where she painted for decades, achieving a minimalism that rendered her work almost sculptural. Herrera “lived frugally” on her husband’s income as a public school teacher and exhibited on street corners. Only in 2004, at age 89, did she sell her first painting, at a gallery show of Latin American art. At that point, her career “finally began to take off,” said The New York Observer. The international press began paying attention, and within 10 years her works were fetching sixfigure sums.
Herrera’s paintings now hang in the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Whitney Museum, which dedicated a 2016 retrospective to her. She had been “preparing for several upcoming projects this year,” said ArtNet, including sets for a ballet and a New York gallery show that opens on what would have been her 107th birthday. But Herrera insisted she never painted hoping for fame. “I do it because I have to do it,” she said in 2009. “It’s a compulsion.”