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Lot Essay
“Color is the essence of my painting. What starts to happen to it as you reduce its numbers and come down to two colors, then there is a subtlety, an intensity in the way two colors relate to each other”—Carmen Herrera
“There’s a saying that you wait for the bus and it will come,” Herrera observed a decade ago, before exclaiming, “I waited almost a hundred years!” (in P. Hoban, “Works in Progress: One Hundred Years of Fortitude,” New York Times, 15 May 2015). Accolades may have come late in life, but Herrera has since taken her rightful place within narratives of postwar abstraction. Born in Havana, she studied sculpture in the early 1930s before beginning to train as an architect, at the University of Havana, in 1937. “There, an extraordinary world opened up to me that never closed,” she later reflected. “The world of straight lines, which has interested me until this very day” (in “El Color de la Palabra: 32 Artistas Cubanos; Entrevistas de Gustavo Valdés, Jr.,” Stet Magazine 1, no. 2, Winter 1992, p. 21). That architectonic sensibility informed the progression of her painting over the following decades, culminating in the bold, minimalist geometries and intensely hard-edged colors that became her hallmark. By the time that her acclaimed retrospective, Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016, she had entered the collections of major institutions, among them the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Walker Art Center.
Herrera’s practice evolved betwixt and between New York, where she moved in 1953 following her marriage to Jesse Loewenthal, and Paris, where the couple spent an extended sabbatical between 1948 and 1953. While she missed the camaraderie that she had known in Havana, she enrolled at the Art Students League and made a few, lasting friendships among New York’s downtown crowd. “We spoke about the nature of abstraction, its very essence,” Herrera recollects of her conversations with Barnett Newman and his wife Annalee, who became close friends. “Barney felt strongly that abstraction needed a mythological or religious basis; I, on the other hand, wanted something clearer, less romantic and dark.” Still more decisive was her encounter with the legacy of early twentieth-century Constructivism during her years in Paris. There, Herrera participated in a number of group exhibitions, including Art cubain contemporain (Musée National d’Art Moderne, 1951), organized by the Cuban Concretist Loló Soldevilla, and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, a bastion of postwar geometric abstraction founded in 1946. “Everything that was in the exhibition was abstract, geometric, even pre-minimal,” Herrera recalled of the Salon. “Albers’ paintings touched me. I was able to see more work by the Bauhaus. I felt that this was the kind of painting that I wanted to do. I had found my path as a painter” (in A. Anreus, “Carmen Herrera in the Context of Modern Painting in Cuba,” in Carmen Herrera: The Black and White Paintings, 1951-1989, exh. cat., New York, El Museo del Barrio, 1998, p. 18).
“In 1965 Herrera returned in full force to painting, testing herself with a new series of circular works that she embraced for the challenge they presented,” remarks curator Dana Miller. “That was making my life very interesting,” Herrera acknowledged of these works, “my rapport with the physical part of painting.” She had earlier experimented with tondos—notably Iberic (1949; Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Tondo: Black and White (1956)—and her return to the format confirmed the increasingly minimalist orientation of her mature painting. “The artist Leon Polk Smith, who lived near Herrera and Loewenthal on Nineteenth Street after their move back to that neighborhood in 1964, showed her where to buy the circular supports that he used for his works, simplifying her process dramatically,” Miller notes. “Two of Herrera’s most dynamic works from 1965 are Rondo”—now in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden—“and Horizontal. The diamonds inscribed within each of the circles seem to vacillate between one dimension and the illusion of three, shifting constantly between planar forms and volumetric cubes like an optical illusion that seems to change between duck and rabbit or old woman and ingenue” (“Carmen Herrera: Sometimes I Win,” in Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight, exh. cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016, p. 27).
“Horizontal’s vibrant rays traversing the canvas recall the red wavelengths stretching across the black ground of the 1949 Untitled,” Miller continues. “The sense that beams of light are radiating outward is also apparent in a now lost work, Beacon (c. 1965), in which orange-red vectors spread from the center like signals flashing from a lighthouse. Herrera also made a series of diamond paintings, including Cerulean Blue (1965), Red and White (1966), and a pair of smaller works from 1965 titled East and West, whose white rays emanating from a central point also suggest light fracturing along a horizon line and link them to Beacon and Horizontal. For all of Herrera’s experimentation with form and shape, the circular and diamond paintings are the sole instances before 2011 when her canvases diverged from the orthogonal” (D. Miller, op. cit., p. 27).
“Color is the essence of my painting,” Herrera once stated, emphasizing its compositional and expressive significance. “What starts to happen to it as you reduce its numbers and come down to two colors, then there is a subtlety, an intensity in the way two colors relate to each other.” The dynamic symmetry of Herrera’s colors, pure and precisely calibrated, girds the structure of Horizontal, generating an optical rhythm and drama that belies the very flatness—the “horizontality”—of the canvas. “My paintings sometimes are very bold and filled with risk; other times they are subtle,” Herrera allowed. “I see my paintings at a crossroads, they have much in common with geometry, with minimalism, yet they are neither. To me they are good paintings that do not fit into easy categories” (in A. Anreus, op. cit., pp. 18-20).
“There’s a saying that you wait for the bus and it will come,” Herrera observed a decade ago, before exclaiming, “I waited almost a hundred years!” (in P. Hoban, “Works in Progress: One Hundred Years of Fortitude,” New York Times, 15 May 2015). Accolades may have come late in life, but Herrera has since taken her rightful place within narratives of postwar abstraction. Born in Havana, she studied sculpture in the early 1930s before beginning to train as an architect, at the University of Havana, in 1937. “There, an extraordinary world opened up to me that never closed,” she later reflected. “The world of straight lines, which has interested me until this very day” (in “El Color de la Palabra: 32 Artistas Cubanos; Entrevistas de Gustavo Valdés, Jr.,” Stet Magazine 1, no. 2, Winter 1992, p. 21). That architectonic sensibility informed the progression of her painting over the following decades, culminating in the bold, minimalist geometries and intensely hard-edged colors that became her hallmark. By the time that her acclaimed retrospective, Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016, she had entered the collections of major institutions, among them the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Walker Art Center.
Herrera’s practice evolved betwixt and between New York, where she moved in 1953 following her marriage to Jesse Loewenthal, and Paris, where the couple spent an extended sabbatical between 1948 and 1953. While she missed the camaraderie that she had known in Havana, she enrolled at the Art Students League and made a few, lasting friendships among New York’s downtown crowd. “We spoke about the nature of abstraction, its very essence,” Herrera recollects of her conversations with Barnett Newman and his wife Annalee, who became close friends. “Barney felt strongly that abstraction needed a mythological or religious basis; I, on the other hand, wanted something clearer, less romantic and dark.” Still more decisive was her encounter with the legacy of early twentieth-century Constructivism during her years in Paris. There, Herrera participated in a number of group exhibitions, including Art cubain contemporain (Musée National d’Art Moderne, 1951), organized by the Cuban Concretist Loló Soldevilla, and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, a bastion of postwar geometric abstraction founded in 1946. “Everything that was in the exhibition was abstract, geometric, even pre-minimal,” Herrera recalled of the Salon. “Albers’ paintings touched me. I was able to see more work by the Bauhaus. I felt that this was the kind of painting that I wanted to do. I had found my path as a painter” (in A. Anreus, “Carmen Herrera in the Context of Modern Painting in Cuba,” in Carmen Herrera: The Black and White Paintings, 1951-1989, exh. cat., New York, El Museo del Barrio, 1998, p. 18).
“In 1965 Herrera returned in full force to painting, testing herself with a new series of circular works that she embraced for the challenge they presented,” remarks curator Dana Miller. “That was making my life very interesting,” Herrera acknowledged of these works, “my rapport with the physical part of painting.” She had earlier experimented with tondos—notably Iberic (1949; Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Tondo: Black and White (1956)—and her return to the format confirmed the increasingly minimalist orientation of her mature painting. “The artist Leon Polk Smith, who lived near Herrera and Loewenthal on Nineteenth Street after their move back to that neighborhood in 1964, showed her where to buy the circular supports that he used for his works, simplifying her process dramatically,” Miller notes. “Two of Herrera’s most dynamic works from 1965 are Rondo”—now in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden—“and Horizontal. The diamonds inscribed within each of the circles seem to vacillate between one dimension and the illusion of three, shifting constantly between planar forms and volumetric cubes like an optical illusion that seems to change between duck and rabbit or old woman and ingenue” (“Carmen Herrera: Sometimes I Win,” in Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight, exh. cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016, p. 27).
“Horizontal’s vibrant rays traversing the canvas recall the red wavelengths stretching across the black ground of the 1949 Untitled,” Miller continues. “The sense that beams of light are radiating outward is also apparent in a now lost work, Beacon (c. 1965), in which orange-red vectors spread from the center like signals flashing from a lighthouse. Herrera also made a series of diamond paintings, including Cerulean Blue (1965), Red and White (1966), and a pair of smaller works from 1965 titled East and West, whose white rays emanating from a central point also suggest light fracturing along a horizon line and link them to Beacon and Horizontal. For all of Herrera’s experimentation with form and shape, the circular and diamond paintings are the sole instances before 2011 when her canvases diverged from the orthogonal” (D. Miller, op. cit., p. 27).
“Color is the essence of my painting,” Herrera once stated, emphasizing its compositional and expressive significance. “What starts to happen to it as you reduce its numbers and come down to two colors, then there is a subtlety, an intensity in the way two colors relate to each other.” The dynamic symmetry of Herrera’s colors, pure and precisely calibrated, girds the structure of Horizontal, generating an optical rhythm and drama that belies the very flatness—the “horizontality”—of the canvas. “My paintings sometimes are very bold and filled with risk; other times they are subtle,” Herrera allowed. “I see my paintings at a crossroads, they have much in common with geometry, with minimalism, yet they are neither. To me they are good paintings that do not fit into easy categories” (in A. Anreus, op. cit., pp. 18-20).