Urban Art Association

This is awesome. Such a perfect image and totally calming to my mind. Also a bit rich for my blood. Good luck!

Carmen Herrera
Island, 2020
Lithograph
28 1/8 × 26 1/16 in
71.4 × 66.2 cm
Edition of 23
Hand-signed by artist
$15,000

www.artsy.net/artwork/carmen-herrera-island

She’s not going to have a long career with this kind of pricing

I think at 105 her career is ok 😂

Low edition size make a difference? Seems signed on the back - not front.

ridiculous pricing for an early-career artist....

I’ve got a few. This a great image but the price just isn’t justified.

I think tops. If secondary prices at auction rarely hit 10k
It seems ambitious to start at 15.

She’s an icon and a legend and will obviously pass sooner rather than lately sadly , so I guess she’ll have a price spike after.

I really hope they make some new shows on her. The 100 years show is wonderful.

A true art legend

London show now:

theperimeter.co.uk/on-view/

Imho, historical context does not add value to something that is entirely abstract and lacks any incorporation of that context. We judge (or at least should judge) the quality of art by its enduring appeal.

To analogize, compare this work to the albums produced by a visionary band or musical group. Let’s say they make an album, and most people agree that the album is pretty crap. It wouldn’t matter if their first album is the greatest album of all time. The second album would still be a terrible album.

To your second point, random nobodies put out crap music all the time and people love it and those artists earn a ton of money.

I didn’t think we were arguing. I thought you made some interesting points and was trying to contribute to the discussion as well. Apologies if it came off adversarial. I appreciate your well reasoned posts on subjects like this.

Found this article too: www.ft.com/content/8f08a20a-ac28-4a56-92f2-362a426d35ad


Carmen Herrera: the 105-year-old artist on late-life fame

The Cuban-American painter and sculptor talks about colour, feminism — and why being ignored is ‘a form of freedom’


The Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera celebrated her 105th birthday this year, and email was her medium of choice for our interview. Forty-eight hours after sending my questions, I received replies whose vivacious, intimate tone and occasionally whimsical syntax showed that the elderly artist was still firmly in control of her own voice.

That is cosmic justice, given how long it has taken for her to be heard. Like so many female artists of her generation, Herrera remained largely invisible throughout the 20th century.

An exponent of geometric abstraction, working in bold, tangy colours and crisp lines, there was no reason for her not to have been classed as a groundbreaking minimalist alongside the likes of Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella. But this was an era when a gallerist — female, as it happened — had no qualms in telling Herrera that, however good she was, she couldn’t be shown “because I was a woman”, as the artist recounted in the insightful 2015 documentary about her life, The 100 Years Show.

Other than participating in a sprinkling of New York shows devoted to Latin American artists, Herrera remained in the shadows. In the late 1990s, a solo show at El Museo del Barrio won critical acclaim. But it still took another 10 years before, in 2009, Ikon Gallery in Birmingham invited her to show for the first time in Europe, when one critic called her “the discovery of the year — of the decade”. A year later she joined Lisson Gallery and in 2016, when she was 100 years old, New York’s Whitney Museum gave her a solo show that catapulted her to art-world stardom.

Herrera is equanimous about the neglect. “Being ignored is a form of freedom,” she writes. “I truly used that all my life. I felt liberated from having to constantly please anyone.”

Our conversation is triggered by the decision of collector Alexander Petalas to show Herrera’s work at The Perimeter, his independent art space in London’s Bloomsbury. Working in collaboration with Lisson, Petalas has put together a rare display of Herrera’s paintings and sculptures from the 1980s and ’90s.

“I just thought it was really special and beautiful,” Petalas tells me, when I ask why he was drawn to Herrera’s vision. “There’s something incredible about the simplicity [of the work] without being simple.” He was impressed by her “commitment to working in two colours since the ’50s, early ’60s. She’s never veered off course.”

Being ignored is a form of freedom. I used that all my life. I felt liberated from having to please anyone

Colour, Herrera says, is always about “a dialogue”. She has always been “curious about two colours reacting or dancing with each other”, she continues, before admitting that “all colours are quite the same to my liking . . . including black and white. But put two of them together in the context of minimal forms and divisions, with a straight line, and you have a unique sensation.”

The paintings at The Perimeter testify to her words. In a trio of panels — “Blues” (1991), “Two Yellows” (1992) and “Horizontal” (1992) — Herrera paints the surface in one colour, fizzing lemon or intense cobalt, then disturbs it with a right angle or rectangle whose narrow border contrasts a shade of the same hue. The result illuminates the background colour in such a way as to evoke its essence. Blue has never looked “bluer” than in a Herrera painting.

Many critics assume her effervescent palette stems from her Latin youth. But although she admits her “sense of colour must have Cuban roots”, she stresses that colour “is a most intuitive thing”: the time she has spent in New York and Paris is a key influence, as are artists from “Giotto to Zurbarán to Malevich and Mondrian”.

If that sounds as if she’s lived life to the full, it’s no lie. Born in Cuba in 1915 to a father who founded the newspaper El Mundo and a mother who was a reporter, Herrera took drawing lessons as a child before travelling to Paris, where she studied art, and visited Rome and Berlin. She returned to Cuba in 1931, just before the president, Gerardo Machado, was forced to step down and Herrera’s own brothers were arrested.

The “political turmoil” put paid to her chance to study architecture, though she did manage a year at the University of Havana. Yet, “fascinated by space and lines”, she studied architecture on her own and considers that research crucial to her later painting practice.

Asked if she is a feminist, Herrera is scornful. “My mother was the first feminist in Cuba!” she exclaims. “She was a working journalist. It was always part and parcel of the parlour and dinner discussion of my home. Of course I am a feminist. What a question to a woman!”

Yet she makes no bones that her husband, Jesse Lowenthal, was also a cornerstone of her career. The pair met in 1937 when Lowenthal, a poet and English teacher, visited Havana. After their marriage in 1939, the couple moved to New York. “He truly believed in my work and would not allow me to leave my studio to earn extra income,” Herrera writes, as she recalls life with someone she describes as “quite a man, a literature teacher, a linguist [he spoke six languages]. At the age of 95 he taught himself ancient Greek so he could read Homer in the original.”

Her only regret, she says, is that Lowenthal did not live to see her success. (That he died at the age of 98 tells us how overdue that success was.)

Nevertheless, the couple clearly had a blast. In 1948, they moved to Paris for six years and became part of a charmed circle that included the artist Marie Raymond (the mother of Yves Klein), Jean Genet and fellow Cuban painter Wifredo Lam. “Such interesting people!” writes Herrera, the exclamation mark underscoring her excitement at a world where she saw “the first production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot . . . what a shock!” and participated, in 1949, at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, which championed abstract art and included Robert Delaunay and Jean Arp among its stable.

In New York, she had her first solo show in 1956 at the Galeria Sudamericana (her very first solo had taken place in Havana in 1950). Living on Central Park West, she and Lowenthal hosted tertulias (social gatherings) with bohemian friends. Every Sunday, she recalls, they enjoyed brunch with Barnett Newman and his wife Annalee. “Barney was . . . a source of wisdom and an incredible intellect.”

When success finally came, it gave Herrera “a lift and a major surprise”. With paintings selling for seven-figure sums, she was at last able to “afford to do my sculpture!” Explaining that her paintings had been “begging to become sculptures” since the 1960s, she enthuses over the “beautifully metallic surfaces” she can now create.

Two of her sculptures — in aluminium, painted in acrylic and exuding her signature tension between passionate colour and restrained form — are included in The Perimeter show, while an exhibition of large-scale outdoor sculptures is due to be unveiled in Houston, Texas, later this month.

An “avid reader” all her life, Herrera has recently become devoted to the poetry of Emily Dickinson and quotes the following lines: “I’m nobody! Who are you?/Are you — Nobody — too?”

Carmen Herrera, however, is somebody at last.

These hung around on eBay for a long time a few years ago. It seemed to be one seller selling a lot of them. They were $900 from what I recall.