LOEWS Summer/Fall 2011 - (Page 14)

engage AdriAnA Lopez SAnfeLiu/CourteSy of tony BeChArA Carmen herrera p loews magazine AT 96, THIS PIoNEERING PAINTER IS FINALLY ENJoYING RECoGNITIoN FoR HER STARK, RADIANT CANvASES. by hilarie m. sheets ersistence can pay off—even if you’re not discovered until age 89. That’s what happened to Carmen Herrera, a visionary practitioner of hard-edged abstraction. Born in 1915 in Cuba, she studied painting in Paris, then architecture in Havana. She moved to New York in 1939 when she married teacher Jesse Loewenthal and then later In contrast, Herrera used bold, geometric shapes to distill essential truths about life, harmony and tension. For instance, in 1987’s Yesterday, a thin white stripe slices diagonally down then up and then back down again across a solid black field, suggesting the vicissitudes of life on a given day. In Blanco y Verde (1971), two bright green triangles abut each side of the white canvas and narrow to a point at each corner, creating a push-pull between positive and negative space. Are the triangles encroaching on the space or being pushed out of the frame? The piece lyrically addresses such tensions and nods to ideas of duality, balance and relationships. Despite her talent, she remained unknown, exhibiting sporadically until 2004, when gallery owner Frederico Sève was putting together a show of female geometic painters. Herrera’s friend, painter Tony Bechara, recommended her work, and Sève was stunned by what he saw. He contacted collector Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, who bought five canvases. Since then, others have followed Cisneros’ lead, both private collectors and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Tate Modern in London. Inspiringly, despite being confined to a wheelchair, Herrera still paints. In fact, she exhibited twice last year, once at the Latin Collector Gallery in New York and again in London at the Lisson Gallery. returned to Paris in 1948. There, she showed in consecutive years at the influential Salon of New Realities, crossing paths with Josef Albers, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Ellsworth Kelly. She came back to New York in 1954—but it would be another 50 years before her career took off publicly. Several factors may have intervened: Herrera was a woman, an immigrant and her work was very different from that of Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists who ruled the art world at the time. Their work was more turbulent and gestural, typified by the almost violent brushwork of de Kooning or Pollock’s arabesque lines of paint that he flung or poured. 14 

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of LOEWS Summer/Fall 2011

The Great Outdoors
Shore Things
Carmen Herrera
The Right App-Titudes
Spice Routes
Futiles Fixes
Music City Sampler
The Future of Flying
The Stories Behind the Songs
Romantic Pleasure in the Pink Palace
Philly 2.0
The Breakfast Club
Local Living
News and Notes

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