Carmen Herrera: 'Men controlled everything, not just art'

We are looking at a book of her work. Some of her earlier, curvier pictures remind me of Matisse’s cut-outs. She creates them in a similar way: cutting out shapes and placing them at different angles. She smiles when I mention the French postimpressionist. Herrera is a voracious reader and, as it happens, is just reading a book about Matisse and Picasso. “I don’t like Picasso,” she says. “He is dangerous. Matisse is a nice person. I saw Picasso many times, but never made friends with him. I was near Notre Dame one day, looking along the Pont Neuf, and I saw a tourist painting Notre Dame and as he paints, he is explaining to this gentleman what he is doing and the gentleman just keeps nodding and looking. The gentleman was Picasso.”
That’s a sweet story, I say. She looks horrified. No, she says, there is nothing sweet about it. “It was Picasso stealing, as he always does, from everybody. I will never allow in my lifetime a book with Picasso’s paintings in my house, because they are bewitched. When people look at his paintings, they start painting like him. I like Matisse better as person, personality, art, everything.”

Herrera returned to New York in the mid-50s and her work gradually became more minimalist: the voluptuous curves flattened into sharp lines that taper off to nothingness or stretch to infinity. She calls it a process of purification, trying to make her art ever more simple. “I never met a straight line I did not like,” she once said. What is their appeal? “I like the form of things,” she says simply.

Male artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Barnett Newman (a neighbour and friend, with whom she used to breakfast every Sunday) were ploughing a similar furrow and being rewarded for it, but success continued to elude her. It seemed that geometric abstractions were just dandy, so long as you weren’t a woman. She can see now that the men fared better not simply because they were men, but also because they were more streetwise. “They were better than me at knowing how to play the system, what to do and when. They figured out the gallery system, the collector system, the museum system, and I wasn’t that kind of personality.”

Not surprisingly, she cannot work on her own these days. For one thing, she is arthritic and wheelchair-bound. So when she is ready to develop a piece, she calls her assistant, Manuel Belduma, who buys the canvasses and places them horizontally on an old architectural drafting table that rotates, enabling Herrera to work on it bit by bit. She tells Belduma where to place the sticky tape that sections off areas of the painting, and then they paint the piece between them.


                                                    

The Guardian