1. I am going to speak about a minimalist artist Carmen Herrera. My objective is to use the artist’s biography to discuss how the artwork titled “Uno” (1971) may help us to address the issues of female artists in minimalism, and whether minimalist art can dress such issues at all. 


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2. If you thought that Abstract Expressionism was largely dominated by male artists, then be sure that Minimalism as a movement had even fewer women in the orbit. Minimalism is defined as one of the art styles of the 1960s, that is associated with artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Carl Andre. This form of artistic expression calls for simple, three-dimensional, geometric forms that are stripped of any illusionism, iconography, or personal expression. It may be Frank Stella who is known for making the first push towards minimalism in the late 1950s. But by that point, Carmen Herrera was already creating compositions in a minimalist style of her own, like “Bianco y Verde” (1959), a work that is key to her later masterpiece “Uno” (1971). Herrera had remained outside of the main ongoing formal painting even though she has made pioneering contributions to minimalism.


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3. According to the Guerilla Girls’ poster of 1989 called “The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist”, one of the disadvantages of being a woman artist is ‘knowing your career might pick up after you are eighty’. It took Carmen 89 years to get the recognition she deserved, the age at which she sold her first painting having laboured in obscurity for nearly 70 years. This year she turned 104. 


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4. When art historians deal with women artists, often the biography has a way of taking over the work itself. In fact, biography plays a key part in addressing the issues rather than work itself because her art does not criticise social structures, it does not have any political message to convey. Her art does not deal directly with the issues of the exclusion of women, for that reason, her biography is the vehicle to looking at women in minimalism. Herrera believes that If art is good enough you shouldn’t have to explain it and you don’t need words. She said to a journalist: “You art about art, you don’t talk about art”.


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Herrera is from Havana, Cuba, but almost all her life she has been an immigrant, whether in NY starting from the late 50s or Paris in the early 50s. While at Havana, she entered art school to study architecture, which was crucial to her work. Paris was full of artists from all over the world and she was treated as an equal. There she becomes a part of this mix of musicians, poets, and gets exposed to Russian suprematism, the Bauhaus, which allows her to finally find her own artistic voice. She becomes part of the group at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles - an association of artists focusing on abstract art. She exhibited in the Salon with artists like Ben Nicholson, Ellsworth Kelly, Josef Albers and Sonia Delaunay. She abandoned the figurative by distilling it to the point where it becomes minimalist. She knows that she has reached a point where if you remove anything from this painting, then the whole painting would fall apart because too much has been taken away. That is what at the core of her definition of the minimalist.


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5. In the late 50s in NY Herrera created a body of work centring around the dichotomy between the white canvas and bisecting geometric forms rendered in green, “Bianco e Verde” (1959) is an
example of that. In the later part of the 1960s, she explored the idea of turning these paintings into a sculpture through sketches, that would project the painting into the viewer’s space. She felt the need for a hard surface to support the ‘hard’ edges. The paining had this architectonic inception that is

important for the development of her later work. It was only in 1971 that she came back to this body of work to create for the first time 3-dimensional hangings based on the paintings from the 50s.



6. She was trying to boil things down to the most essential properties and plain, colour and line. She starts to reduce her pallet to 3 colours, then to two. “Uno” consists of two different pieces of painted

wood balanced gently together. The work is surprisingly sensual considering the arithmetic element of the work. It is first and foremost a celebration of the colour yellow, making the pigment the central player in the composition. In fact, this sculpture is exemplary of how Herrera was able to make colour be form, by distilling representation to a single colour. It can also stand as a dichromatic work if you accept that the negative space becomes the second colour. Besides, approaching “Uno” from various vantage points reveals different shades of yellow not only within the crevices of the bisecting forms but also in the reflections of surrounding light as it hits the painted surface. Lines emerging from 4 directions create 2 triangles which touch or almost touch. This subtle touch creates a sense of fragility in this seemingly rigid composition. This adds an element of weightlessness to this work. Its complexity is in its simplicity. 


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All these are the groundbreaking developments for which Rauschenberg and Stella get credit for right at the same time. Herrera was coming up with almost the same ideas at the same time the very celebrated male artists did like Robert Rothenburg and Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella. When she and her husband moved to NY, her ‘less is more’ formalism was not accepted, as Abstract Expressionism was in fashion and she couldn’t get a gallery. She recalls feeling what discrimination is when being told by an avant-garde gallery owner Rose Fried: “I’m not going to give you a show because you’re a woman.” Well-known female artists were resented because people didn’t believe that women could paint. Everything was controlled by men, not just art.


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Herrera found practically every door closed, she calls it ‘benign neglect’. She was not met with aggression, but rather would simply not be considered. Besides, it was futile to even try because of her Latin American descend. Being a female Cuban painter was hard at that time because there was a lot of anti-Cuban sentiment. Her nationality became her signifier regardless of her artistic intent or sensibilities. She was constantly pigeonholed into gallery exhibitions by Latin American artists. For Herrera, her nationality did not play a key part in her art. She believes she is a painter, not a Cuban painter. She did not get to have a museum show until 1984 in the Alternative museum in NY.


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Her being ignored was, in fact, a form of liberation. It meant she had the freedom to do what she felt she had to do, that’s how she saw the glass half full. One of her messages is: ‘Don’t be intimidated about anything’. Her art was not easily digestible at the time, she was ahead of her time. Herrera has persevered, has stayed true to herself and her form, and is finally getting the recognition she deserves. Carmen Herrera has rightfully earned her place within the canon of art history as one of the most important and influential abstractionists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since that first sale in 2004, collectors have avidly pursued Herrera, and her radiantly ascetic paintings have entered the permanent collections of institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and the Tate Modern. Last year, MoMA included her in a pantheon of Latin American artists on exhibition, in my opinion, still failing to fully recognise that Herrera stands outside the national boundaries. She is an artist, not a Cuban artist.