Carmen Herrera (May 31, 1915 – February 12, 2022)
Ignored by the art world until her 80s, abstract artist Carmen Herrera has died, aged 106.
Carmen Herrera’s career and commercial standing was transformed at the age of 89 after her work was shown in an exhibition at the Latin Collector Gallery in TriBeCa, New York in 2004.
She was born in Havana in 1915 where her father founded the El Mundo newspaper and her mother was a journalist and founder of a feminist group. She was sent to school in France, before returning to Cuba to begin a degree in architecture at the La Universidad de la Habana in 1938. She met her future husband, the academic Jesse Loewenthal, during her studies; after their marriage they moved to New York in 1939.
It was only after the couple moved again, to Paris in the years following the Second World War, that she began to paint in her recognisable, definitively abstract style, shifting from figuration and representation, as part of the Salon des Realités Nouvelles, an art association founded in Paris in 1939.
In the past two decades, Herrera received long-overdue recognition. Her works can now be found in several permanent museum collections, including the Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate, London; among others.
Even in 2022, Carmen Herrera was in the process of planning for future projects, among them a ballet with Wayne McGregor at the Royal Opera house in London and two exhibitions at Lisson Gallery.
‘Iberic,’ 1949, Acrylic on canvas on board, 40 in. (101.6 cm)
Photograph: Ken Adlard/Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery © Carmen Herrera
Words by Gareth Harris
