Herrera’s paintings, while essentially flat, function similarly [to sculpture] by creating the illusion of planes that serve as orthogonal lines, energizing the composition and imbuing it with an aura of forward-moving space that projects into the viewer’s sphere of physicality.
Carmen Herrera was born in Havana Cuba in 1915, during World War I. She studied architecture at the Universidad de La Habana in Havana, Cuba from 1938–39 and then painting at the Art Students League from 1943-47 in New York City, where she had moved with her husband, English teacher Jesse Loewenthal (1902–2000) in 1948.
I became a painter and in 1939 moved to New York. During the forties and fifties I met many artists that would later become rather well known. I was friends with Barnett Newman, Polk Smith, Wifredo Lam, Amelia Pelaez and many others.
Herrera and Lowenthal lived in Paris for nearly 5 years before permanently settling in New York in 1954, where Herrera lived until last year, when she passed away at 106. Like many women artists of her generation, Herrera was well-known to and respected by her peers, but struggled to find a foothold in the commercial art world or in institutions, consistently overlooked in favor of her male colleagues – who in some cases even borrowed her visionary ideas. Despite these challenges, Herrera painted – almost every day – until the end; her career spanned over 7 decades, but she did not sell a single painting until 2004, at 89.
A resounding example of the elegance of line and color in their purest forms, the present work embodies Carmen Herrera’s fundamental and long-overlooked contribution to the history of minimalist abstraction.
In More Yellow, Less Green, Herrera's distinctive green and yellow color palette, recalls earlier series such as Blanco y Verde (1959-1971) and speaks to the structural eloquence of her canvases, wherein planes of color in dynamic and precise geometric compositions are rendered in juxtaposition. A right-angled edge separates the narrow band of green running across the upper and left sides of the canvas from the yellow mass that presses insistently upward against it. The compositional pressure radiating from the upper left-hand corner paces the work's structural order. The combination of value and color in Herrera's work creates intense visual effects that challenge the viewer's perception: in the present work, space appears both illusionistic and flat, receding and coming forward simultaneously, as suggested by the title.
Since her first solo show in Europe in 2009 and especially over the past couple of years, Herrera’s art has been added to numerous important private and public collections, including the Whitney, Tate Modern, MoMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Pérez Art Museum, and National Gallery of Art, among others. Her estate is represented by Lisson Gallery. As Dana Miller stated in the exhibition book of Herrera’s 2016 solo show at the Whitney, “Lines of Sight,” the “Whitney and its sister institutions are now playing catch-up to her, acknowledging today what should have been obvious and valued half a century ago” (Dana Miller, Carmen Herrera: Sometimes I Win, Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight, New York 2016, p. 37).