Carmen Herrera
At the Whitney from through January 2
The newest art star in the New York scene is Carmen Herrera, a Cuban-born 101-year-old woman who has been doing her own brand of geometric, hard-edged abstraction for more than 50 years, virtually unknown. Born into an affluent family in Havana in 1915, Herrera studied architecture, married American Jesse Loewenthal and moved to New York in 1939. In 1948 the couple relocated to Paris, where Herrera befriended a group of abstract artists and honed her individual style, showing at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. Loewenthal, a teacher, always supported her work (he died in 2000), but the life of a female artist until recent decades has never been straight-forward. Herrera returned with her husband in 1954 to New York during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, but the idiosyncratic spareness of her style left her thoroughly ignored. One gallerist, Rose Fried, told her, “You can paint circles around my men artists, but I’m not going to show you because you are a woman.” Says Herrera: “I walked out of there and felt like I had been slapped in the face.”
A 1998 show at El Museo del Barrio in New York changed all that. And now, Herrera, who is still creating art every day in her New York loft, is having a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in its new downtown home. “Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight” will run through January 2. Fifty works from over three decades will on view, including drawings and rare three-dimensional pieces. “It’s a passion,” Herrera told The Cut last spring. “Every morning, I get up, I have breakfast, I go to the table and I begin drawing.”
