NEW YORK — Cuban-born artist Carmen Herrera says she’s still bursting with ideas she wants to put on canvas, but the centenarian doesn’t feel any urgency to hurry.
“I don’t let anything push me,” said Herrera, who turned 100 on Sunday.
She’s been painting since the 1930s. Yet fame arrived late. She sold her first work in 2004, when she was 89. After that, recognition came quickly. Today her works are in the permanent collections of major museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London.
“Blanco y Verde,” a 1966 canvas of white dominated by an inverted green triangle, is part of the inaugural exhibition at the new Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 2016, the museum plans a solo show of her work.
This month, Herrera’s work will be featured at Art Basel in Switzerland and in October at the Frieze Masters art fair in London.
When the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, presented a solo exhibition of her work in 2009, The Observer of London hailed her as “the discovery of the decade,” asking “how could we have missed these brilliant compositions?” A retrospective at the German Museum Pfalzgalerie followed.
Born in Havana in 1915, her father was the founding editor of the daily El Mundo and her mother was a journalist. She took art lessons as a child, attended finishing school in Paris, studied architecture and trained at the Art Students League in New York. In 1939, she married Jesse Loewenthal, an English teacher at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan.
She developed her artistic style during the postwar years in Paris, where the couple lived from 1948 to 1953. Between Paris and New York the couple socialized with many artists including Jean Genet, Barnett Newman, Wifredo Lam and Willem de Kooning. She joined the influential Parisian gallery, Salon of New Realities, where she exhibited alongside such abstract artists as Max Bill and Piet Mondrian.
Fame hasn’t changed her lifestyle. She still paints every day because “I have a lot to say yet,” she said.
Her birthday celebration was a low-key affair at a local restaurant attended by 30 guests, each of whom received a small work signed by Herrera printed on the back of the menu. The birthday cake was based on a design she recently completed.
Asked how she’d like to be remembered, Herrera replied, “I don’t want to be remembered.” When the questioned was rephrased to “How do you what your artwork to be remembered,” she didn’t hesitate.
“Great,” she said.
