Carmen Herrera

Carmen Herrera was born in Havana, the daughter of a newspaper editor and a journalist. She studied architecture at the University of Havana in the late 1930s, which taught her to draw with a ruler and to love the straight line, then married an American teacher, Jesse Loewenthal, and moved to New York in 1939. Between 1948 and 1953 they lived in Paris, where she showed with an association of abstract painters and stripped her work down to a few shapes and two colours.

Back in New York her paintings could not have been more out of step. Abstract expressionism was loud, gestural and male; hers were quiet, geometric and by a Cuban woman. A well-known dealer, Rose Fried, told her she could paint circles around the men in her gallery but that she would not give a show to a woman. Herrera went home and kept painting. She did so, in the same downtown loft, for the next fifty years, with Jesse teaching English to support them both.

Her first sale came in 2004, when she was 89, after a gallery included her in a show of Latin American women artists. Collectors followed, then the Museum of Modern Art and Tate. In 2016 the Whitney gave her a retrospective; she was 101. She said she had waited a long time for the bus, and that when it came she got on.

Jesse died in 2000 at 98. She worked from a wheelchair until near her death in 2022, aged 106.