Carmen Herrera was a Cuban American abstract painter, sculptor, and minimalist known for her formal simplicity and striking use of color. She first traveled to Paris at the age of fourteen to attend the Marymount School, where she studied art history, painting, and French. Herrera later returned to Cuba to study architecture for a year at the Universidad de La Habana. Shortly after, she married American Jesse Loewenthal and moved to New York City, where she attended the Art Students League and took printmaking classes at the Brooklyn Museum. Struggling to find an artistic community and a receptive audience in New York, Herrera returned to Paris and shifted her practice from representational forms to purely geometric abstraction—a style that would define the remainder of her career. Despite recognition from the artistic community in Europe, Herrera did not sell her first painting until the age of eighty-nine.
Photo courtesy Todd Heisler/The New York Times
