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Carmen Herrera (US,
born 1915 Cuba), Untitled, 1952. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 25" x
60" (63.5 x 152.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2015 Carmen
Herrera. (MOMA-P5120)
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I recently learned
about an artist who turned 100 this past may. Turning 100 is fabulous, and even
more fabulous is discovering that this artist was ahead of her time
stylistically in painting, but did not sell her first painting until she was
89! Unlike Alma Thomas, who began painting when she retired from teaching,
Carmen Herrera painted steadily for 60 years before she started gaining
international attention in the early 2000s. I’m not sure if the word
“concretist” is real (my spell-check says it isn’t), but it’s as good a word as
any to describe Herrera’s work.
Long before World War II (1939–1945), the great De Stijl
artist Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) sought to redefine abstract art as
“concrete art,” because he felt that the term “abstract” denigrated non-objective
work when discussed in terms of “reduction” or “simplification.” He indicated
that there was nothing more concrete than pure, non-objective art. The
geometric, minimalist abstraction pioneered by the De Stijl artists and some
artists from the Bauhaus, such as Josef Albers (1888–1976), did not disappear
after World War II, when Abstract Expressionism and its European counterparts,
l’Art Informel and Tâchisme, dominated modernist experiment. It persisted in
the work of artists like Carmen Herrera.
Carmen Herrera, born in Havana, was one of the post-war
Latin American modernists concerned with geometric, minimalist, and optic
abstraction in painting and sculpture. Some Latin American artists—who
exhibited in both Europe and their own countries—formed groups dedicated to
abstraction such as Los Disidentes (Venezuela), Grupo Madi (Argentina), and the
Concretists (Brazil). Herrera went back and forth between Paris and Cuba during
the 1930s and 1940s, having originally studied architecture at the University
of Havana. She studied at the Art Students League in New York between 1949 and
1953, where she was affected by the work of other geometric minimalists, such
as Leon Polk Smith (1906–1996), Barnett Newman (1905–1970), and Ellsworth Kelly
(born 1923).
Herrera painted this work while at the Art Students League,
right before she settled into her studio near Union Square in 1954, in which
she still paints to this day. Compared the the action painting dominating the New
York art scene at the time, Herrera’s paintings seem to bridge the geometric
minimalism of pre-World War II European painting with the Op Art and Minimalism
of the 1960s. Even a lot of Barnett Newman’s geometric abstraction is not as
beautifully precise as Herrera’s. (She was good friends with Newman and his wife.)
Herrera’s stated purpose in her work is to condense her
forms to the simplest, most refined state possible. Recent works feature single
colors, sometimes contrasting with unpainted areas of canvas.
I’ll show you four other artists who worked in a similar
vein to Herrera around the same time period, with one exception. The first two
artists were also geometric minimalists whose work may have impacted Herrera’s
direction:
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Leon Polk Smith (1906–1996, US), Untitled, 1946. Gouache on cardboard, 24" x 16" (61 x 40.6 cm). Private Collection. © 2015 Leon Polk Smith Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York. (8S-18373lpvg) |
And here are two artists usually associated with
minimalist-optical geometric abstraction, but mostly in the 1960s:
Correlations to Davis
programs: Explorations in Art Grade 4: 6.35; Explorations in Art Grade 5:
3.15, 3.16, 3.Connections; Explorations in Art Grade 6: 5.25; A Community
Connection: 6.2, 8.4; A Global Pursuit: 5.5; Experience Painting: 9; Exploring
Painting: 12; Exploring Visual Design: 1, 9, 11, 12; The Visual Experience:
9.3, 16.7
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