visual haikus at the whitney

BY VAL CASTRONOVO

This is a story about the ultimate outsider who becomes the ultimate insider. Carmen Herrera (1915- ) arrived in New York from Havana in 1939 — a woman, a Cuban and an abstract, minimalist painter at a time when the city’s art community was lauding abstract expressionism. She painted for seven decades in relative obscurity, while her male contemporaries (Robert Rauschenberg, Barnett Newman, Stuart Davis, Frank Stella et al.) garnered all the attention.

“It was only in the 21st century that she received widespread recognition. She was discriminated against as a woman and an immigrant,” Dana Miller, the show’s curator, said at last week’s preview. “She was too much for any gallery or museum. In 2004, she began being included in [non-Latin American] galleries and started being collected. Collectors were ahead of the museums.”

The Whitney included. Despite its long history with abstraction, the museum didn’t purchase a Herrera, “Blanco y Verde” (1959), until 2014, part of “an aggressive rethinking of American art history,” chief curator Scott Rothkopf said at the preview. The green-and-white picture debuted last year at the new downtown Whitney’s inaugural exhibit, “America is Hard to See” — and is now the centerpiece, along with eight other paintings from the green-and-white series, of a four-room show. “Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight” is only the sixth museum presentation of the 101-year-old artist’s work.

“It’s like being in a chapel,” the Whitney’s director, Adam Weinberg, said about the central gallery, a showcase for the seminal Blanco y Verde paintings (1959-1971), each featuring spikey green triangles on crisp white backgrounds.

The exhibit focuses on Herrera’s early career, from 1948 to 1978, when she forged her trademark no-frills style. As she said about her emphasis on form and color to the exclusion of everything else: “I had to forget about trimmings and go to the core of things.” Miller said that Herrera thinks of her works as visual haikus. “Less is more is Carmen’s mantra,” she said, quickly adding that she does “more with less.”

The curator was dispatched by the museum a few years ago to add an early Herrera to its collection. Why early? To show that Herrera was innovating at the same time that her male counterparts were — but not getting the credit. Her quest led to the present solo show, the first in the city in almost 20 years (Herrera’s black-and-white geometrics were the subject of a rare museum display at El Museo del Barrio in 1998).

The current exhibit is organized chronologically, beginning with the painter’s 1948 move to Paris with her husband, Jesse Loewenthal, a teacher at Stuyvesant High School. It was in postwar Paris where she thrillingly came in contact with Russian Suprematism, Josef Albers and Bauhaus, Miller said, and experimented with different types of abstraction. The works in the first room are abstract and busy, some looking like several paintings in one — and one, “A City” (1948), showing vestiges of representation in the form of a church steeple. Herrera would slowly strip away the non-essential until she reached her hard-edge style, a pure distillation of color and shapes, with straight lines.

Two of her eye-popping black-and-white striped paintings from 1952, when she was still in Paris, are featured in the second gallery and telegraph her later devotion to line and a two-color palette. “Line is important, she loses her contours,” Miller said of her steady stylistic evolution. These rigorous geometric pictures have painted frames, too. Frames and edges became compositional elements. “The edge of the canvas is another way of making a line,” the curator noted.

As she writes in the catalog about the artist, who briefly trained as an architect in Havana: “Herrera was thinking about the ‘objectness’ of her painting and using panel divisions and the edges of her canvases simultaneously with artists who have previously been heralded for such developments.”

Her works have a sculptural quality and, like sculptures, need to be seen in person. You have to walk around them to fully experience them. “Blanco y Verde” from 1967, considered one of her finest efforts, features the tip of a slender green triangle wrapping around the left edge of the painting, while the other three edges are painted green — making for a “green halo effect” against the museum’s pristine white wall. “Herrera was considering the total environment of her work — not just the canvas but the impact of it on the wall where it would hang,” Miller writes. Her colors were taken directly from the tube or can, and she used masking tape and draftsmen’s tools to achieve precision.

The last gallery is a showcase for four rare, wooden sculptures (“estructuras”) from the late 1960s-early 1970s, proof that Herrera “thinks about things in the round,” Miller said, pointing out correspondences between the 3D-works and the paintings in an adjacent room (e.g., “Amarillo ‘Dos’,” 1971, and “Blanco y Verde,” 1966-1967, respectively).

For this centenarian, art was a vocation, like the ministry. Miller was succinct: “She was never in it for the money or the fame. She just did it without that.” And she’s still doing it, nearly every day.