While Carmen Herrera developed her idiosyncratic style for over half a century, it is generally believed that she sold her first painting in 2004 at the respectable age of 89. One gallery explicitly told her that even though she was more talented than many male artists, they would not represent her because she was a woman. Exhibiting along other Latin American artists while ignoring adversity, Herrera pursued her own path, persevering with her studio practice until the age of 106.

One of her most significant bodies of work, the Blanco y Verde paintings, conceived between 1959 and 1971, reveals Herrera’s sustained investigative exploration of the differences in tonalities of white in relation to green. Herrera regarded her extended Blanco y Verde series as among her most consequential work.[1] Each of the fifteen known paintings are an iteration of a set of basic principles: rectangular compositions in green and white with triangular wedge shapes. With the composition wrapped around the edge of the canvas—allowing for a sculptural perception of the painting—it also intentionally eliminates the possibility for a future frame.

The artist has been characteristically cryptic about her intent for the Blanco y Verde paintings. The absence of individual titles—but for two exceptions: Irlanda, dated 1965, in the collection Pérez Simón, Mexico, and the present To: P.M.—does not reinforce a supplemental narrative. While Irlanda alludes to Ireland’s de facto national color, To: P.M. references Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), notorious for both abandoning green and diagonals.[2] Although there is no preliminary drawing for To: P.M., the green wedges can be perceived as a cube’s diagonals. When understood as a white cube, it’s titular tribute to Mondrian, who achieved equilibrium only after innumerable complex steps, becomes even more telling. Mondrian’s rooms propose an alternative to the white cube ignored by modernism: “By the unification of architecture, sculpture and painting, a new plastic reality will be created. Painting and sculpture will not manifest themselves as separate objects nor as mural art, which destroys architecture itself, nor as applied art but being purely constructive will aid the creation of a surrounding, not merely utilitarian or rational, but also pure and complete in its beauty.”[3]

Another allegiance Herrera could have recognized in her Dutch predecessor is the late career recognition. Mondrian—now one of the most celebrated Modernist of the twentieth century—did not have his first solo exhibition until almost 70 years old. For Herrera, success would come even later. Despite the mistaken belief that Herrera did not sell a painting until 2004, To: P.M. was acquired from the Cisneros Gallery shortly after it was completed. The $800 asking price was satisfied in exchange by Latin American antiquarian books by the painting’s first owner: Elisha “Tram” Combs. Combs enjoyed living with the painting for almost five decades, until it left his apartment in advance of the Whitney retrospective in 2016.

Possibly To: P.M. was included in the 1968 group show Five Latin American Artists at Work in New York at the Art Gallery at the newly established Center for Inter-American Relations, founded by David Rockefeller, at 680 Park Avenue, now known as the Americas Society.[4] In a New York Times review, Hilton Kramer acknowledges Herrera as one of two most accomplished artists in the exhibition, praising her Blanco y Verde contribution.[5] Regardless of this critical acclaim, Herrera’s paintings would not be included in contemporaneous exhibitions outside of the Latin American orbit and the Blanco y Verde paintings were not shown together again in half a century until the Whitney survey.

[1] D. Miller, op.cit., pp. 28-29

[2] D. Miller, op.cit., fn. 72, p. 4e

[3] Piet Mondrian, The New Art - The New Life: Collected Writings, 1936

[4] The five Blanco y Verde paintings in the exhibition are all dated 1967 and numerically titled “1c”, “3”, “4”, “5”, “7”. As only five paintings in the Whitney exhibition are dated 1967, To: P.M. was probably one of the exhibited paintings.

[5] Hilton Kramer, New York Times, 6 January 1968, p. L25

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/01/06/77164802.html?pageNumber=25.