Attributed to Carmen Herrera, it does not have a COA. Medium: abstract black and white oil wood. 17.5 x 12 inches. Provenance: private owner.
Biography: Born: 1915 - 2022. One afternoon in late April, the artist Carmen Herrera was sitting in her apartment and studio a few blocks north of Union Square recalling the frequent visits she would make to the Whitney Museum of Art some 70 years ago, when it was located in Greenwich Village. â€Å“It was empty!” she said. Nobody went to museums. It was incredible. And now, you go to a museum, you want to look at something and hundreds of people are in front of you.”Herrera shared this with good-natured exasperation, almost laughing as she complained. She turned 100 this past Sunday, and seems well past the age of worrying. Plus it would not quite be fair to be too upset about the crowds at museums, since the throngs that are filling one of them at the moment, the Whitneys new home in the Meatpacking District, are now seeing her work, after years of obscurity—a large painting she made in 1959 that has a short green isosceles triangle that stretches across the middle of a white canvas. The museum acquired it just last year.It is a stunning painting, and it is hung in perhaps the most beautiful and tranquil room in the new museum, alongside pieces by well-established giants like Frank Stella, John McLaughlin, Ellsworth Kelly, and Agnes Martin. The work is titled Blanco y Verde, a straightforward name that underscores Herreras remarkable achievement: an art of crisp, clear straight lines, of pure color and pure shape. Her paintings are cut to their bare minimum, but it would be wrong to describe them as sparse or restrained. Their solid colors are arranged so that they teem with energy, whether effervescent (as in a bright orange rectangular diptych from 2007) or subtle, like that 55-year-old white and green number.In recent days Herrera had been having trouble hearing in one ear, and so her longtime friend, Tony Bechara, a voluble artist, sometimes helped her to understand my questions, speaking more loudly than me or translating them into Spanish, which she first spoke growing up in Havana. Nevertheless, she was quick with her quips. â€Å“Men!” she exclaimed, when Bechara spoke too much about her work. â€Å“We cant live without them, and we cannot live with them.”Herreras father was a newspaper editor, her mother a reporter. Growing up in Havana, she took art classes, but she studied to be an architect, quitting that path in the late 1930s when she married Jesse Loewenthal, a school teacher who died in 2000 at the age of 98. (By that point she had still not sold a single painting.) Around the time of her marriage she began painting in earnest.Her first great inspiration was the Cuban artist Amelia Pelaez, Herrera told me. â€Å“I admired her so much. I liked what she was doing. It was the first thing I really liked. I heard her and I asked questions, and she was terrific.”The couple moved to New York, and Herrera studied at the Art Students League. It was all women, and I hate to say it,” she said, shaking her head, but we were like cats”fighting.” She recalled that one of her teachers, Fredo Sides, told one of her friends, â€Å“What is she doing here? Why doesnt she go home and begin painting, think about whether she wants to be a painter or not? I think she is very good, she better get out of here.” And so, â€Å“Thank you!” she said, â€Å“And I left.”She and Loewenthal moved to Paris after the war, where she quickly fell in with the abstract artists showing under the banner of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, and she developed an organic form of abstraction, with flowing, curving shapes. Europe seemed more receptive to her work, and the fact that it was made by a woman. By the mid-1950s the two were back in New York for good, and her work became sharper and more minimal. Barnett Newman, whose paintings perhaps most closely resemble hers, and his wife, Annalee, were neighbors. â€Å“We used to have breakfast every Sunday together.”â€Å“I was very young, much younger than they were,” she said. â€Å“I was just listening. I knew very little English, but it was very interesting.” What did she learn from him? Dont be intimidated about anything,” she said. That was a useful lesson since, despite having occasional shows in the coming decades, nothing ever sold, a streak that ended only in 2004, when Bechara got a dealer interested for the first time, igniting a wave of support from the market and museums.

All authorship of items in this catalog are described according to the following terms:

Signed [Artist Name] : In cases in which the signature is legible in the lot, this work is described as-is with no attributions given.

By [Artist Name] : The work is by the artist.

Attributed to [Artist Name] : The work may be ascribed to the artist on the basis of style, but there may be some question as to actual authorship.

In the manner of [Artist Name] : The work was executed by an unknown hand, but was designed deliberately to emulate the style of the artist.

After [Artist Name] : The work was executed by an unknown hand, but is a deliberate copy of a known work by the artist.

Circle of [Artist Name] : A work of the period of the artist showing his influence, closely associated with the artist but not necessarily his pupil.

Follower of [Artist Name]: A work by a pupil or a follower of the artist (not necessarily a pupil).

American, 19th century: This work was executed by an unknown hand, and can only be identified by origin (i.e., region, period).

Mint, based on the description