Carmen Herrera, Cuban Painter and Sculptor, Dies in the United States

February 15, 2022

The renowned Cuban artist Carmen Herrera passed away this Saturday at her home in Manhattan. Herrera, whose paintings of radiant colors and geometric forms went unnoticed for decades, sold her first painting in 2004, when she was 89 years old. Since then, her work became a sensation in the art world.

Herrera's father founded the important newspaper El Mundo and her mother was an exceptional reporter at a time when women did not usually hold such a position. Carmen grew up in a home inspired by intellectual concerns.

In Art History, Carmen Herrera is important for being a pioneer and continuator in geometric abstraction currents, while at the same time her personal narrative in these endeavors transformed into a kind of legend, which many media outlets repeat ad nauseam, when she was recognized internationally at the age of 89.

In 2015, fortunately, filmmaker Alison Klaymen had the wise and timely idea of making her a documentary titled The 100 Years Show, when the artist celebrated her centennial.

The film, which barely lasts half an hour, was successfully presented at several film festivals, among which was the Miami Film Festival.

Beyond everything written about her mythical figure, nothing replaces the possibility of seeing her work and converse from her apartment in New York, where she lived happily for more than sixty years.

Carmen Herrera is a great grandmother of few words, with sweetly accented English, capable of affirming, with profound sense of humor, that she was not granted motherhood because providence perhaps thought that she would hang her children on walls as if they were paintings.

The painter appears working every morning, even though she now moves about in a wheelchair. She has the essential help of Manuel to create her paintings.

"If you go to the basics, you can never fail," she affirms about her aesthetic. She adheres to the cliché of "less is more." "When I have something finished, I remove another element from it and it improves."

"I never paid attention to money and I always thought that fame was something vulgar. I simply worked and waited. And at the end of my life, many recognitions are coming to me to my amazement and pleasure."

She was born in 1915, studied her high school education in Paris, but later returned to Havana to pursue studies in Architecture.

However, in 1939 she married Jesse Loewenthal, a polyglot American Jew, a teacher in the Bronx in New York City, where she settled, after a stay in Paris during the postwar period. There she shared with the most important artists of the time.

"Carmen Herrera did not paint Cuban landscapes or flowers of the Tropics, the kind of art that might be expected from a Cuban emigrant who had lived in Paris," said Julián Zugazagoitia, former director of the Museo del Barrio in New York, with admiration. Her late recognition "speaks to the difficulties that an artist woman, an immigrant and ahead of her time, has to overcome. Hers is a story of personal strength."

In the documentary, Herrera refers to her poetic art without any pretense: "I like to bring order to the chaos we live in, that's why I'm a geometric painter."

She confesses that she had a very happy childhood in Havana, remembered as if she had never left, although she considers Castroism as a betrayed dream. The democratic hope faded quickly to become "a terrible dictatorship," where the family had to maneuver to free one of her brothers, who was imprisoned for five years. "Revolutions don't make sense," the artist declares.

In the documentary, Herrera confides in her dear friend Tony Bechara that if she could express the ideas of her images with words, she would not have dedicated herself to painting them.

When asked about a solo exhibition about to open at the Whitney Museum, she responds, without hesitation: "It's about time. Better late than never."