Carmen Herrera, the old woman who sold her first painting at the age of 90, dies at 106

The Cuban painter carmen herrera, who achieved fame only when she was already an old woman, died yesterday at her home in New York at the age of 106, as announced by the Lisson gallery that represented her.

“It is with immense sadness that we announce Carmen’s death (…) She died peacefully in her sleep in her New York studio-apartment where she lived and worked since 1967, most of that time with her husband Jesse Lowenthal, who also died in house in 2000″, write the gallery in his obituary.

Herrera sold his first painting at the age of 90 and, despite having gone unnoticed for decades, his works hang in the MoMA in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and in London’s Tate Galerie.

Trained in her native Havana as an architect in the years 1938 and 39, He completed his artistic education in Paris, Rome and Berlin, cities where he experienced the emergence of the avant-garde, in particular in Paris, where he lived between 1948 and 1954.

In that year, he moved to New York, and befriended artists such as Mark Rothko or Barbara Hepworth, while developing his minimalist style of geometric abstraction, characterized by a very precise palette of only two or three colors in each composition.

“There is nothing I love more than a straight line, how to explain it? It is truly the beginning of all structure (…) Someone told me one day that I will paint a point and I will have finished”he joked once.

According to her gallery, Herrera was saved and condemned at the same time by her refusal to embrace any movement, even the one that was naturally closest to her, the minimalism of the 70s of the last century, “dominated by men”, because that rejection ” It left her free to experiment in her own way.”

ANDThe New York Times remember today that Herrera “painted in the dark for decades”, in which she lived on the income of her husband, an English teacher, and highlights that her leap to true fame did not occur until 2004.

At the end of 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art dedicated a retrospective to her, the second individual exhibition achieved by the Cuban artist in a long career that began in the 1950s, after the one she starred in in 1984 in the now-defunct Alternative Museum.

One week after her 102nd birthday, the artist then sold her painting vertical at a Christie’s auction for more than double the anticipated amount, $751,500, a testament to the fame he has achieved in recent years. (I)