Carmen Herrera
1915–2022
Carmen Herrera was educated in Paris and Havana and studied at the Art Students League of New York before moving with her American husband to Paris, where she lived from 1948 to 1953. During that time she showed regularly with the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, an international group of artists focused primarily on abstraction, and developed what would become her signature style: a form of geometric, hard- edge abstraction featuring no more than two or three colors in each composition.
Upon returning to New York in 1954 Herrera found an art world dominated by Abstract Expressionism. Yet she continued to make works in her uniquely distilled style, and until the early 1990s she had few public showings and received little critical attention. Blanco y Verde is part of a long-running series of paintings she composed in white and green. The broad expanses of white in these works extend to the surrounding walls, so that the green triangles—rendered in various sizes and positions—appear to be cuts into space. In diptychs such as this one, the seam between the canvases presents yet another form of division. Here the union of forms and surfaces conveys a structural tension that pushes beyond Herrera’s investigation of line and color to explore the boundaries between two- and three-dimensional space.
Introduction
Carmen Herrera (May 31, 1915 – February 12, 2022) was a Cuban-born American abstract, minimalist visual artist and painter. She was born in Havana and lived in New York City from the mid-1950s. Herrera's abstract works brought her international recognition late in life.
Wikidata identifier
Q522662
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed July 24, 2025.
Introduction
Cuban-born artist painted in obscurity for decades before achieving acclaim when she was eighty-nine. She was active mostly in the United States, but lived in Paris from 1948 to 1956, where she developed the style for which she would much later become renowned, a form of geometric abstraction.
Country of birth
Cuba
Roles
Artist, painter, sculptor
ULAN identifier
500332016
Names
Carmen Herrera, Carmen Herrera Nieto
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed July 24, 2025.
