30 Facts About Carmen Herrera

Carmen Herrera was a Cuban-born American abstract, minimalist visual artist and painter.

Carmen Herrera was born in Havana and lived in New York City from the mid-1950s.

Carmen Herrera began taking private art lessons from professor Federico Edelmann y Pinto when she was eight years old.

Carmen Herrera attributed these lessons to her facility for discipline and for providing her with the fundamentals of academic drawing.

Carmen Herrera furthered her training in 1929, at the age of 14, when she attended the Marymount School in Paris.

In 1938, Carmen Herrera continued her education at the Universidad de la Habana to study architecture, where she stayed for only one academic year because in the time she wanted to pursue her architectural career there was as she related.

In 1939, Carmen Herrera married English teacher Jesse Loewenthal, whom she had met in 1937 when he was visiting Cuba from New York.

Carmen Herrera moved to New York to be with him and they lived in his apartment on East Nineteenth Street.

Carmen Herrera left the Art Students League in 1943 when she felt that she had learned all that she could from Corbino.

Carmen Herrera then began taking printmaking classes at the Brooklyn Museum, but left there after a year.

In New York, Carmen Herrera struggled to be included in museum exhibitions, and felt that Havana would have provided her with more opportunities than she was offered in the United States.

Carmen Herrera encountered various international artists such as Theo van Doesburg in Paris at the Salon des Realites Nouvelles.

In 1950, Carmen Herrera made a return trip to Cuba where she painted a series of highly gestural abstract paintings.

Carmen Herrera exhibited these works in a solo show in December 1950 in Havana at the Lyceum, but the audience was not receptive.

Carmen Herrera continued to face rejection from the art world during her time in New York, largely due to her gender.

Carmen Herrera continued creating without recognition until her late-life discovery, beginning in the early 2000s.

The key to understanding Carmen Herrera's style is remembering that, before she left Cuba, she was trained as an architect.

Carmen Herrera was an often-overlooked contributing factor to Herrera's artistic process.

Carmen Herrera is not only significant for her contributions to geometric abstraction; many of her works are complex representations of the natural world.

Carmen Herrera is notable for consistently having manipulated the effect that triangles often have in paintings, which is providing context and perspective that takes away from a works abstraction.

Carmen Herrera was not broadly recognized or appreciated for decades, though she sold her first piece of art at age 19.

In 2019 Carmen Herrera was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, as an Honorary Royal Academician.

Carmen Herrera exhibited several times at the Salon des Realites Nouvelles beginning in 1949.

Carmen Herrera has had a breakthrough with her exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

Carmen Herrera's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.

The first section focused on works created from 1948 to 1958, during which time Carmen Herrera experimented with many types of abstraction.

The second section focused on works from 1959 to 1971 and is a collection of paintings entitled Blanco y Verde, which Carmen Herrera considered the most important work of her career.

Carmen Herrera first conceived the series in the 1960s with a group of diagrammatic sketches that extended the experience of her paintings into three dimensions, but the works remained unrealized.

Carmen Herrera remarked that it is the "beauty of the straight line" that kept her going.

Carmen Herrera died on February 12,2022, at the age of 106.