Carmen Herrera (Cuban-American)

Carmen Herrera (born May 31, 1915) is a Cuban-American abstract, minimalist painter. She was born in Havana and has lived in New York City since the mid-1950s. Herrera's abstract works have brought her international recognition late in life. She turned 100 in May 2015. Born in Havana in 1915, Herrera was one of seven siblings. Her father was the founding editor of the newspaper El Mundo, where her mother was a reporter.[2] Herrera has lived in France, Cuba and the USA, moving frequently throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Returning to Cuba from Paris around 1935, Herrera studied architecture.[3][4] She met in 1939 English teacher Jesse Loewenthal, when he was visiting from America,[5] married him and moved to New York, abandoning her degree course.[4] From 1943-1947 she studied at the Art Students League in New York City.[6] Abstract expressionism was blooming in late 1940s New York, which had become an art metropolis, but instead of taking advantage of that, Herrera moved to post war Paris. There she was inspired by the era of re-build after the war, and found her own style. Herrera got to know the young artists from Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, an art collective striving to challenge the traditions of the art scene. One of them, Fred Sidès, was enthusiastic about Herrera's work, and wanted it in an exhibition. But when he said that her art seemed to be full of so many images, Herrera had an insight. "I said to myself: Oh God, what he is telling me is that I have too much in it." From then on her work has always been a search from the greatest possible simplicity. Her art is about shapes and colour, and how they relate to each other.[7] In 1954 Herrera settled in New York. Discovery by the art world Edit In 2004, her friend, painter Tony Bechara, attended a dinner with Frederico Sève, the owner of the Latin Collector Gallery in Manhattan, who had a much-publicized show of female geometric painters from which an artist had dropped out.[5] Bechara recommended Herrera.[5] When Sève saw her paintings, he at first thought they were by Lygia Clark, but found out that Herrera's paintings had been done a decade before Clark did paintings in a similar style. REFERENCE:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Herrera