Cuban painter Carmen Herrera dies at 106 in New York City.
The prestigious Cuban painter did not sell her first work until 2004 when she was 84 years old.
Cuban plastic artist Carmen Herrera, whose paintings of radiant colors and geometric shapes went unnoticed for decades before she became an art world sensation, died this weekend in New York City at the age of 106. AP reported.
It was the artist Antonio Bechara who confirmed to The New York Times that Herrera died at her home in Manhattan on Saturday, although he did not specify the causes.
Carmen Herrera was not ill and did not suffer from any major health complications. So far no more details have been released about the causes of her death. Maybe she dies due to old age.
Although Herrera’s paintings, minimalist compositions full of straight lines, shapes, and color, can now be found in the permanent collections of major museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London, it was not until her 89 years old, in 2004, she sold her first work.
” The heart of Carmen Herrera’s painting is a drive for formal simplicity and an impressive sense of color,” London-based Lisson Gallery said of the Cuban artist.
“A master of sharp lines and contrasting color planes, Herrera creates symmetry, asymmetry, and an infinite variety of movement, rhythm, and spatial tension on the canvas,” added the entity.
In 2009 the price of a work of art by Herrera, a pioneer of geometric abstraction and Latin American modernism, was around 50 thousand dollars, however, five years later her works were sold for more than triple.
Herrera said that she painted because she had to. “It’s a compulsion that also gives me pleasure. I never had an idea of money in my life and I thought that fame was a very vulgar thing… and at the end of my life I am receiving a lot of recognition, to my surprise and my pleasure”, she stated in a 2009 interview.
Herrera was born in Havana in 1915. She was the daughter of one of the founding editors of the Cuban newspaper El Mundo, Antonio Xavier Herrera, and her mother, Carmen Nieto, was a reporter for the newspaper itself.
She studied architecture at a university in Havana and traveled frequently between Cuba and Paris during the 1930s and 1940s.
She interned at the Art Students League in New York, where she moved in the mid-1950s after marrying Jesse Lowenthal, a literature teacher at Stuyvesant High School.
Working as a female artist in post-war America was a difficult challenge, she recalled in an interview with The Observer in 2010: “People weren’t ready for my work.”
Herrera recalled how an avant-garde gallery owner in New York cheekily told her: “Carmen, you can paint circles around the male artists I have, but I will not give you an exhibition because you are a woman.”
But being an unknown artist had its advantages, she said, as it meant she could work to please herself and no one else.
In the late 2000s, she had solo shows at the Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern Museum in Germany and the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England. A decade earlier she exhibited at the Museo del Barrio in New York.
Herrera’s art can also be found in many other museums including the Hirshhorn Museum and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, as well as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Amelia Warner
Amelia Warner writes all the Latest Articles. She mostly covers Entertainment topics, but at times loves to write about movie reviews as well.
