MILLER
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Carmen Herrera: Sometimes I Win
which may have been the one exception to this marginalization.)44 For Herrera, such narrow classification was devastating. She later said that she felt “terrible about it. I don’t want to be considered a Latin American painter or a woman painter or an old painter. I’m a painter.”45 Herrera—who had lived and worked in Havana, Paris, and New York—should have transcended geopolitical borders, and any national categorization placed upon her is, at minimum, specious and at worst reductive. In 1956 she had a solo exhibition at Galería Sudamericana, a New York gallery devoted to Latin American artists. It received a favorable mention in the New York Times from the critic Dore Ashton, who wrote that “Carmen Herrera is one of Cuba’s best nonobjective painters.”46 Of course, Herrera’s pleasure at receiving such praise was tempered by the geographic specificity of Ashton’s assessment. Her reference to “Señorita Herrera” (even if meant to signal respect) and the exoticizing implicit in descriptive phrases such as “the sharp light and native excitement of Cuba” further revealed Ashton’s cultural bias. Herrera was highly aware that as a Cuban artist, audiences and critics likely had specific expectations of her work: high-key color, figurative imagery, and ideally a tropical subject, all in keeping with a fiery Latin temperament. But Herrera had no interest in catering to these stereotypes. “I don’t have a heart to paint. I have a brain to paint,” she said. “I don’t paint babies or flowers or things like that. They don’t interest me.”47 When Herrera befriended the Cuban artist Waldo Díaz-Balart (born 1931) in New York, she felt she had found a rare, like-minded Cuban abstractionist. “We were mutually surprised at the fact that we were both painting this kind of painting, because among the Latinos, and even more so among the Cubans there was practically no one who did,” she recalled. “Waldo and I felt as if we were two circus freaks.”48 Herrera consistently has resisted identifying artistically with a particular place: “I don’t believe that the ‘Cuban painter’ exists, or the ‘French painter’ or the ‘American painter’. . . . I am not, in the sense of my work, at all nationalist,” she said. “The artist is universal and neither definitions nor status limit him. In reality my work doesn’t approach what the great Cuban masters—many of them, my friends—traditionally made.”49 When pressed, however, the artistic heritage she has professed the greatest affinity for is neither Latin American nor Caribbean but Japanese. She said, “I have always reacted in an incredible way to Japanese art . . . to the reduction of things.”50 For decades Herrera had in her home a reproduction of one of the famed 36 Views of Mt. Fuji by Japanese artist Hokusai (1760–1849). Even more tellingly, she often
FIG. 9
Ellsworth Kelly, South Ferry, 1956. Oil on canvas, two joined panels: 44 × 38 in. (111.8 × 96.5 cm) overall. Private collection FIG. 10
Ellsworth Kelly, Jersey, 1958. Oil on canvas, 60 × 72 1/2 in. (152.4 × 184.2 cm). Private collection