The Forms of Silence: Carmen Herrera

Abstract Works, 1948 – 1987

Miami Art Central, September 21 – November 13, 2005

The Forms of Silence: Carmen Herrera, Abstract Works 1948–1987 is the first major museum retrospective of Cuban-American painter Carmen Herrera. Her recognition as a key figure in the development of 20th-century abstract art is long overdue. Since the 1940s, Herrera has developed a singular approach to line and form, exploring the dynamic interplay between positive and negative space. Her work addresses some of the most essential questions in abstract art—and proposes profound solutions. What is the essence of the pictorial medium? What role does the materiality of the support play? What is the architectonic relationship between the artwork and the space it inhabits?

Three divergent cultural influences—Havana, Paris, and New York—intertwine throughout Carmen Herrera’s life and work. Born into an intellectual family in Havana in 1915, Herrera was shaped early on by a cultivated environment: her father was the publisher of El Mundo, and her mother, a journalist. She began her artistic training under J.F. Edelman, director of the Academia de San Alejandro, and later earned a degree in painting and art history from Marymount College in Paris in the early 1930s. Upon returning to Havana, she became part of an informal circle of painters, poets, and writers—among them Alfredo Lozano and Cundo Bermúdez—whose salons, recitals, and exhibitions formed a vital core of the city’s cultural life. Amelia Peláez, a close family friend, was a significant presence during Herrera’s formative years.

In the late 1930s, Herrera enrolled in the architecture school at the University of Havana—an experience that, according to the artist, had a lasting impact on the development of her work. Her self-description as “first and foremost” an architect is revealing, as her painting quickly departs from organic references and assumes a character that is tectonic, constructive, and rigorously articulated. Yet movement is never absent; her work orchestrates a continuous, often elusive play of inversions between figure—the plane that appears to advance—and ground.

Herrera married Jesse Loewenthal in 1939 and moved to New York, where she studied at the Art Students League before returning to Paris in 1948. Postwar Paris, then a major center of European artistic renewal, welcomed Herrera into the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, where she exhibited annually from 1949 to 1952. The Salon’s revival of abstraction in the context of Europe’s reconstruction was not merely aesthetic—it reflected a deep engagement with the socio-political realities of the time. In a postwar landscape marked by disillusionment, the utopian ideals of a universal order, once embodied in the rational geometry of Mondrian and others, gave way to more ambiguous visual strategies. Herrera encountered the work of Josef Albers and other former Bauhaus figures, whose postwar compositions emphasized perceptual uncertainty over rational clarity. Albers’s paintings, as Herrera later recalled, "touched" her, while the Bauhaus legacy pointed her toward what she would call her “path as a painter.”

Herrera’s formalism is at once rigorous and expansive. Her reductive visual language—anchored in simple, precise geometric forms—conveys both intensity and emptiness, balancing the ascetic discipline of constructivism with a contemplative, almost spiritual sensibility. Her compositions are executed with remarkable economy, structured by rational principles but suffused with a lyrical interplay between reason and vision. She typically arranges bold planes of color into refined geometric configurations. Interspersed throughout her career are black-and-white series, often composed of diptychs or triptychs, which serve as a means of ongoing exploration into the structural logic of her practice. These works extend beyond painting into a reflection on architectural space, foregrounding the relationship between the image and its physical context. In this sense, Herrera treats paintings as objects, a foundational premise of minimalism, the visual language which her work anticipates.

Despite early engagement with avant-garde circles in Havana and Paris, Herrera's career unfolded in relative obscurity after her permanent move to New York in 1954. Her identity as a Latin American artist working in a geometric mode—and as a woman—may have contributed to her exclusion from the dominant Abstract Expressionist narrative. This marginalization helps explain why her five-decade-long contribution to abstraction was often overlooked in mainstream accounts of postwar art. Herrera continues to occupy a liminal position between North American and Latin American artistic traditions yet ultimately belongs to a broader international lineage. Her practice remains a solitary and unwavering pursuit of form, balance, and silence.

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The Forms of Silence: Carmen Herrera, Abstract Works 1948–1987 is organized by Miami Art Central (MAC) and curated by Rina Carvajal, MAC’s Executive Director and Chief Curator. Miami Art Central’s presentation of this exhibition is sponsored by the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor, the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners, and the Cowles Charitable Trust.