The film-maker Alison Klayman’s latest subject was for many years a marginalised artist, arguably because her work was ahead of its time, but perhaps even more so because of her gender and ethnicity. Cuban-born Carmen Herrera, who turned 100 in May, had to wait until she was in her 90s to sell her first work. In the past decade she has had shows at the Museo del Barrio in New York and the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK, and finally achieved recognition as an important artist.
“I find Carmen’s story particularly inspiring as a film-maker, and for anyone with an artistic career or undertaking long-term pursuits that may or may not ‘pay off’,” Klayman says. “What makes you keep going? How do you do it without external validation?”
The 100 Years Show reveals the centenarian artist’s vitality, her determination to keep working and her all-round sheer sassiness. When Klayman asks for her reaction to her retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, scheduled for autumn 2016, she replies: “About time, I would say. About time. Better late than never …”
Herrera was born in Havana, where her father founded a newspaper and her mother was a journalist and founder of a feminist group. She was sent to school in France, before returning to Cuba in the 1930s and beginning a degree in architecture. She met her future husband, Jesse Loewenthal, during her studies; after their marriage they moved to New York in 1939. She did not complete her degree. It was only after the couple moved again, to Paris in the years following the Second World War, that she began to paint in the definitively abstract, geometric style for which she is now widely known (the film quotes a Christie’s description of her as “very possibly the oldest contemporary artist working today”, but she is strictly Modernist). Although in France she exhibited alongside Josef Albers and others, and was influenced by Suprematism, on returning to New York in the early 1950s, she could not get a dealer. In the film she relates the story of a (female) gallerist who told her she was a better painter than many of her starrier male contemporaries but there would be “no show because you are a woman”.
“I walked out of the place as if someone had struck me,” Herrera says. “A woman to a woman?” Nevertheless, she kept painting. Finally, in 2004, the gallerist Frederico Sève told the painter Tony Bechara, then the chairman of the board of El Museo del Barrio, that he needed a third participant for a show of female geometric painters after one artist pulled out. When Sève saw Herrera’s work he thought it was by Lygia Clark, but quickly realised that it was earlier than Clark’s work by at least ten years. According to the New York Times, Herrera’s work almost immediately sold to collectors including Ella Fontanals-Cisneros and Estrellita Brodsky; Agnes Gund donated a work to the Museum of Modern Art. The shows at El Museo del Barrio and at Ikon quickly followed.
Pressing engagements
Nicholas Logsdail, of Lisson Gallery in London (stand B8), says: “The discovery for me was an artist who seemed to be like the missing link in the history of painting.”
Herrera is too frail now to leave her apartment for anything other than the most pressing engagements, and Klayman largely films her at home as she prepares work with the aid of her assistant, Manuel Belduma, and Bechara, her friend and neighbour. It’s a warm and intimate study of a tenacious and highly talented artist. In an ideal world, everyone would live such a long and—finally—fulfilled life and have such a portrait.