Carmen Herrera

Carmen Herrera (2016)

Carmen Herrera (born May 31, 1915 in Havana , Cuba ) is a Cuban-American painter of concrete art , whose work is closely related to the European avant-garde before and after the Second World War.

Life

Carmen Herrera grew up as the daughter of two journalists and the youngest of seven siblings. Her mother, Carmela Nieto , was a well-known feminist and one of Cuba's first female journalists. Her father, Antonio Herrera, who died young, was the editor and author of the Cuban newspaper El Mundo ; Carmen Herrera received drawing lessons at an early age. When she was fifteen, she was sent to Paris for a year for further training . After graduating from high school in Havana, she first studied architecture there. She met the German-born American Jesse Loewenthal and married him. In 1939 she moved to New York with Loewenthal . There she attended the Art Students League of New York and studied painting.

In New York she got to know artists like Wifredo Lam and Barnett Newman and early on she found a style of abstract geometry , which was only completed in Paris. Herrera lived there with her husband from 1948 to 1954. There she met artists such as Yves Klein , took on influences from Piet Mondrian , Kasimir Malewitsch and others and exhibited in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles , among others . During this phase Herrera's works alternated between abstract and lyrical expressionism. She also experimented with new image formats.

In 1950 she traveled to Cuba for some time, where pictures were taken in the style of abstract expressionism influenced by Jackson Pollock . However, she did not feel comfortable there; soon afterwards she gave up this style of painting. Only once did she return to Cuba in 1963 to see her dying mother again.

In 1952 she created the first radical geometric abstractions in which lines and triangles are in the foreground. The result was a series of black and white stripe images that result in different tilting patterns and anticipate elements of Op Art .

The couple returned to New York in 1954, where Carmen Herrera designed her series Blanco y Verde (1959–1971). Here she also got to know the work of Josef Albers . In the paintings with green and white colored surfaces, she experimentally explores the limits of painting, further reducing her two-tone painting by applying the acrylic paints with a roller and thus eliminating every individual brushstroke. In dynamic works like “Rondo” or “Horizontal” (1965) she creates tilted images that can be read several times. Since the 1960s, echoes of architecture have again been incorporated into her works of art. The "Estructuras" are wall or floor objects made of painted plywood panels with surprising optical effects. Herrera, however, keeps her work as stylistically simple as possible and reduces it to a few colored areas .

Herrera lives and works in New York, where her husband died in 2000. After a ten-year break, she resumed painting in 2006 with the help of an assistant. However, she remained relatively unknown until her old age, which perhaps contributed to the fact that earlier smaller exhibitions in American galleries in no way fulfilled the typical public expectations of a “Latin American” painter. At the international level, her first retrospective in Europe attracted attention. In this exhibition at the Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern from January 23 to May 2, 2010 a total of 55 works from her from 1948 to 2007 were on view. From September 16, 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York showed a first retrospective of her work. In cooperation with the Whitney Museum, the Kunstsammlung NRW showed over 70 pictures by Carmen Herrera under the title Lines of Sight from December 2, 2017 to April 8, 2018 .

The Tate Gallery in London and the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York have already paid five-digit amounts in US dollars for their pictures. The abstract image of verticals , the vertical of black and white stripes is and in 1952 Paris was, achieved in May 2017 an auction of Christie's a prize of 751,500 US dollars , more than double of the expected.

Works (selection)

• 1948, painted over in 1952: Iberic , round picture
• 1952: Verticals
• 1958: Equation
• 1959–1971: Blanco y Verde (series)
• 1961: Red with White Triangle
• 1965: Rondo , Horizontal , Irlanda
• 1971: Untitled , signal blue, angled room divider
• 1976–1978: Days of the Week (7 images)
• 2011: Verde de Noche

literature

• Gaensheimer, Susanne; Meyer-Büser, Susanne (ed.): Carmen Herrera. Lines of Sight. Works 1948-2017 . Art collection NRW Düsseldorf. Wienand, Cologne 2017, ISBN 978-3-86832-419-8 .
• Prince, Nigel (Ed.): Carmen Herrera . Museum Pfalzgalerie, Kaiserslautern 2010, ISBN 978-3-89422-166-9 .

Web links

• Later fame. 3sat, January 22, 2010, accessed April 8, 2015 . 
• Old artists: From the ancient school. ZEIT ONLINE, February 2, 2010, accessed April 8, 2015 . 
• Julia Voss : Discovery of a great artist: Carmen Herrera's laughter . She was born in Cuba in 1915, and has become a star in painting at the age of ninety-four: The Pfalzgalerie in Kaiserslautern is showing the first German exhibition by New York artist Carmen Herrera. In: FAZ . January 28, 2010 ( faz.net ).
• Verena Lueken : The freedom of ignorance . Carmen Herrera paints every day - even at the age of one hundred and one. A visit to the artist, who has been painting since the late 1930s, but has only received the public recognition she deserves for a few years. In: FAZ . September 4, 2016 ( faz.net ).
• Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight. Info on the exhibition in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen 2017.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Andrea Aguilar: El largo viaje de Carmen Herrera. In: El País. January 16, 2010, Retrieved May 28, 2017 (Spanish). 
2. ↑ Fame disturbs my work in FAZ from September 3, 2016, page 11
3. ^ Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight , art collection NRW
4. ↑ Carmen Herrera, a sus 101 años, vende un cuadro en 751,500 dollars. In: Diario de Cuba. May 26, 2017. Retrieved May 28, 2017 (Spanish).