CARMEN HERRERA

(B. 1915)

Untitled
2013

Footnotes

Provenance
Lisson Gallery, London (HERR130014)
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2015


Carmen Herrera is one of the most significant and celebrated minimalist painters of the last sixty years. An artist who has been at the very heart of late modernist practice, and has remained fastidiously committed to her singular style over the course of her life, the canon of twentieth century art has been incomplete without her inclusion until her late-life, institutional reappraisal. Presented here, Herrera's Untitled painting from 2013 is a canvas of searing simplicity; a superlative example of the Cuban-American artist's characteristic compositions that intersect space with razor sharp bars of colour.

In the present work, Herrera's lifelong engagement with the formal qualities of the canvas – its objecthood, its surface, its composition – crystalises in a painting of lucid boldness. Elegant in its scale and ablaze with cobalt blue abutted by weightless solids of seething Indian yellow that fluoresce and glow over their respective corners, Untitled wonderfully demonstrates the visual poetics of Herrera's minimalist workings. Painted on the overlap and not hindered by any ornament framing, the present work gives an intensity and mass to the colours and lines that are essential to experiencing her work to its fullest.

Born in Cuba in 1915, Herrera's astonishing life and career as an artist in Post-War Europe and America beckons from one of the most abundantly creative periods drifting out of living memory. Having left a politically turbulent Cuba for New York, cutting short her architectural studies to marry an American, Jesse Loewenthal, in 1939, Herrera had found her calling as an artist. They moved to Paris, residing in the city between 1948 and 1953 – a period that would be so influential and formative to her blossoming practice.

In Herrera's early work, her astute sense of colour and form was evident and palpable. Akin to the blockish, tonal compositions of Paul Klee, taking cues from the work of Kazimir Malevich and Russian Suprematism, it was in Paris that Herrera would begin to refine her style and hone her rigorous relationship to colour and line. Working and exhibiting in company that included Piet Mondrian and Max Bill at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles – where she would show five times during her stay in France – Herrera's practice was not only on the pulse of the painterly discourse of its day, but she superseded many of her male counterparts in their experimentations that deconstructed and fragmented the singular plane of the canvas; the arena of contestation that would become so significant for contemporary painting of the 1950s.

Post-War Paris was a hotbed of artists and intellectuals. It was a place and time without equal, from which flourished much of the philosophy, art, and literature that would be exported to New York in the following decades. Herrera's circles testify to her place in history and the respect she earned from those at the centre of cultural discourse in period: she was close friends with Jean Genet, Yves Klein and his family, sat across from Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the Café de Flore, dined with Barnett Newman on regular weekends, and was an audience member in the first production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot.

On her return to New York in the 1950s, Herrera pared back her work to the harsh minimalist guise she is so fondly revered for, one of the earliest adopters of this newfound style. Her paintings now featured typically only two colours; angular lines became singular arcs; the plane of the canvas delineated into expansive, independent forms. Her fascination with line and form became her signature, famously stating 'I never met a straight line I did not like' (the artist in an interview with Simon Hattenstone, 'Carmen Herrera: 'Men controlled everything, not just art'', Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian, 31 December 2016, online).

Undoubtedly, much has been said of the dialogue between her paintings and those of Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, and a generation of minimalist artists who formally emerged in the 1960s, years after Herrera had arrived on the New York scene with her vivid, breakthrough style. In spite of her being overlooked by galleries and museums alike, her place at the forefront of contemporary painting since the 1950s is now regarded as hugely significant and enduring. Her unrelenting commitment to her own practice continues to be deeply engaged with the surface and object-oriented experience of painting – resolving her canvases in the simplest, discrete, pictorial frames she can achieve.

Major reassessments of artist's careers are rare, and still more during the artist's lifetime. But no one has drawn quite such praise or unanimous admiration for their late-life success as Herrera. As it was in the 2000s, institutional recognition for the artist began to gain traction, and her first retrospective exhibition in Europe took place at the IKON Gallery in Birmingham, U.K., in 2009. It was her large-scale retrospective Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight at the Whitney Museum of American Art, however, that reestablished the history of Minimalism with Herrera in full view, exhibiting over fifty works from 1948-1978.

As her career will continue to be evaluated and celebrated, Untitled stands as one of a limited number of paintings as yet to come to market. Now in global museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Collection, U.K., and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (K20), Düsseldorf, her legacy as an artist in the realms of Kelly and Stella is assured.

An exceptional late painting by one of the most underappreciated artists of the modern era, Untitled is an exquisite example of Carmen Herrera's characteristic style. In spite of her setbacks and discounts, her fortitude in the face of adversity is testament to her rightful place in the canon, and the present work boldly displays the prowess and mastery of craft of a truly historical talent.