Give It to Me Straight: The Infinite Lines of Carmen Herrera

We’re told, as early as we can understand it, that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.  This makes a straight line seem entirely practical, and, if we’re being honest, a little boring.  Nature is proud to show off its curves, from sunflower swirls to human bodies to the horizon itself.  But straight lines?  It’s easy to dismiss them as cold, rational, and, above all, inorganic.  That is, unless you’re Carmen Herrera, the Cuban-American abstract artist who died in 2022 at the age of 106.  Because she knew a thing or two about how impressively long, humane, and beautiful a line can be.

American abstraction took on many different flavors.  Hard-edge abstraction, Herrera’s particular focus, evolved during the 1960s, when artists like the mostly West Coast American male painters Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, and others, were curious about how much it was possible to reduce and reduce images on a canvas and still end up with something both meaningful and arresting for the viewer.  A hard-edge abstract painting looks like a flat pile of colored blocks, where one full, bold color transitions abruptly into another, creating a sharp, clear division between flat geometric shapes and lines that are then purposefully arranged on the canvas.  The result is an artwork where, in the words of the artists, “form is content.” 

Ellsworth Kelly, “Blue Green Yellow Orange Red” (1968).  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

What did they mean by this?  Think about the story we expect when we look at a painting, the narrative we expect to be invited into, like flipping on a TV and getting absorbed into the plot.  But we rarely notice the shape of the TV set or the vibrant colors of the screen.  Likewise, in a painting, we seldom ever think that the canvas, frame, pigment, or shapes on a canvas are a part of the art.  But of course they are, and to hard-edge abstract artists in particular, every component of the painting was critical, coming together as a kind of two-dimensional sculpture of color and shape.  The form of the painting – the pigment, canvas, and shapes – is also the content, that is, the subject matter.

Carmen Herrera, “Blanco y Verde (no. 1)” (1962)

With this in mind, let’s look more closely at Carmen Herrera’s “Blanco y Verde,” from 1962.  The painting is so simple – sharp, skinny green triangles sit in the middle of an otherwise white canvas – that it’s tempting to ask why it should even be considered art at all.  There’s no clear story, and beyond the precise application of painter’s tape, it doesn’t seem like it took any particular talent.  But try to notice the TV set, that is, the form as the content.  Sit with this painting and really take the time to look at it.  You might become aware that the longer you stare, the more these triangles start to vibrate and flicker and hum.  There’s a tremendous amount of eye-catching visual energy in something so simple, as the contrast between the green and the white becomes a dance between the two, playing off of each other like, in Herrera’s words, “a yes and a no.”  Your eyes start to dart between them like you’re watching a tennis match.  You start to notice that those triangle points want to touch, beg to touch, and yet never do.  And the yearning for their connection sucks you into the vortex in the middle of that whiteness; suddenly flat green triangles are mountains on the side of a river, pulling you into the infinite horizon, and you begin to realize how little it takes to create a landscape, to reduce all of nature, and even all of depth, into straight lines and flatness.

While Herrera’s work is a masterclass in the reduction of form, her career is, ironically, a story of what happens when an artist is reduced to being a woman artist in a circle of men.  She trained in Paris and moved in circles of highly influential artists and writers, growing especially close to Ellsworth Kelly, but when she moved to New York in the 1950s, she was told point blank that she would never receive a solo gallery show over the men she was painting circles around because she was a woman.

But as the world turned, so did her luck, eventually, and after a seemingly infinite wait.  She sold her first painting at the age of 81.  She was added as a last-minute fill-in for a show on geometric women painters in 2004.  And from there, she’s been labeled the discovery of the decade: retrospectives, solo shows, Whitney, MoMA, Netflix documentaries, and all the other 21st century markers of artistic success.  “There’s a Cuban expression,” she’s said, “you have to wait for the bus to come, but it will always come.  I waited a century for the bus to come.” 

That said, we should be hesitant to hail Herrera as a woman artist who finally got her due, or a Latin American artist working in a uniquely West Coast style, or an artist who found success decades after the official retirement age.  She resisted all of these labels, opting instead to call herself, simply, an artist.  Or, more precisely, hard-edge abstract artist who lets her work speak for her, and speak for itself.  She aimed to reduce her forms, not her story.  And, in doing so, she showed the world just how much depth can be found in flatness, in the infinite beauty of a straight line.

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