It wasn't that long ago that the mention of Carmen Herrera did not evoke recognition or special interest.

At least if you consider the lifetime of this important artist, who has now died in New York at the age of 106.

Verena Lueken

Freelance writer for the feuilleton.

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106 years, of which she remained unrecognized outside of a small circle of friends for more than ninety in the art world.

In general, in general.

"Fame gets in the way at work," she said during a visit to her New York loft in late summer 2016, and meant it completely seriously.

She was thus able to work undisturbed for almost seventy years, while artists such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, for example, or Ellsworth Kelly were exhibited and became famous on either side of her and found their collectors.

Not Carmen Herrera.

Carmen Herrera was 94 when the New York Times eulogized her with the headline "The New Hot Thing in Painting."

She was ahead of her time

It wasn't her pictures.

As early as 1959, she created one of her most amazing pictures, “Blanco y Verde”, a flat green arrow that cuts through a white surface and thus opens up a space for the viewer like an abstract rabbit hole.

It's an image that 55 years later hung alongside paintings by Frank Stella, Agnes Martin, and Ellsworth Kelly for the opening of the new location of the Whitney Museum of American Art on the edge of New York's Meatpacking District, definitively bringing Carmen Herrera into the canon of American art was.

There was a certain irony in this (and a great satisfaction for her), since it was not only her gender but also her origins as a Cuban artist that stood in the way of her success and appreciation for so many decades.

Born in Cuba in 1915, she lived in Paris from 1948 to 1953 and came to New York in 1954.

Her husband, Jesse Loewenthal, encouraged her in her art.

He was one of the few for a long time.

And there was Tony Bechara, an artist himself, who lived in the same house, launched her first exhibition at the El Barrio Museum of Latin American Art, and was a tireless friend in the last decades of her life.

In 2016, the Whitney Museum sealed with a retrospective entitled "Lines of Sight" what was clear to everyone who could see after the first sale of one of her paintings in 2004 and a European tour through England and Germany: that Carmen Herrera was not only an artist of the color fields, but had found a personal style in the interplay of strong, bright colors with clear geometric shapes.

However, at a time when abstract expressionism was popular in America.

Carmen Herrera was not only a woman and from Latin America – both still cash register poisons in the second half of the twentieth century – but also ahead of her time.

When American art found its way to minimalism, it was already there.

A few years ago, a few sculptures by Carmen Herrera were exhibited in a small park in front of New York City Hall in southern Manhattan.

A bright red upside down angle between hedges, a bright yellow structure made up of shifted surfaces under trees, a blue cuboid next to the road.

As long as they stood there, they gave a completely insignificant place in the middle of the city the appearance of an opening to the world.

Carmen Herrera died in New York on February 13.