Episode 43: Carmen Herrera's Blanco y Verde (no. 1) (1962)
VOICE 1: All right. So, what I’m looking is almost a pure white painting. But there are these two streaks of color. Um, there are these two triangles pointing towards the middle as if they’re making a horizon.
VOICE 2: Like, uh, maybe you could have taken a knife dipped in green paint, um, on one side and then on – across the other, like you’re trying to open this white canvas and see what’s inside of it.
VOICE 3: This painting pulls me in and just… And, of course, the green, absolutely so beautifully vibrant that you can’t help but feel the energy as – as I’m just travelling down this long, long highway into a vanishing point that I know I’ll never get to the end of.
VOICE 2: Seems like it’s pulsing in the middle. And just the way it’s at eye level, it’s, um… Yeah. I do myself squinting and looking from one side to the other – to the other.
VOICE 4: It just kinda bounces your eyes back and forth. You’re in your head. You’re trying to create something that goes beyond those points meeting.
VOICE 2: Yeah. It has a magic eye effect, sort of something jumping out of it. Yeah.
VOICE 5: Okay. This maybe a little bit of a – of a nerdy interpretation, but it reminds me of the early driving video games where you see – all you see is the road and the horizon, and you’re constantly closing in on that – that point of disappearance but never quite reaching it. So, it evokes that, except in an even more basic, simplistic form.
VOICE 3: To me, it’s just this beautifully, pure white. Yeah. Just pure white. And that vibrant green.
VOICE 6: ‘Cause I feel like my brain is inserting variation…
VOICE 3: Oh.
VOICE 6: … That’s not there. [laughs] Because it wants to construct something out of what it’s seeing.
VOICE 4: I see mountains behind that when I look at it.
VOICE 2: Oh. It strikes me as it could be a picture of the outdoors or, all white around the green, maybe something like a crocus coming up to the snow. It seems hopeful in a way, but also kind of… [laughs] If you think about the … An animal’s eyes or something in the darkness. Could be a bit of menacing. So, there’s some activity in this piece for me.
VOICE 7: It’s quiet. Um, a landscape is very quiet. Well, this is a very quiet piece. Um, and the way it divides the canvas creates a tension between the top and the bottom.
VOICE 4: In fact, there’s sort of very little there. But there’s so much tension in the painting. She’s taken a great deal of time to make sure that a horizon line is a little bit above the middle.
VOICE 7: And so, what’s interesting is, with the minimal means, that you actually will look at it for a long period of time, that I think that that’s the, uh, uh, power of the piece. That, uh, you don’t know what it is representationally, but there’s something about the way it’s playing with your eye that it keeps drawing you back into, uh, what is essentially an empty canvas.
[00:03:07]
You know how the teachers walk around in a yoga class, placing those warm, firm hands on your lower back, gently correcting your form? They’re a moth to my flame, almost every time, because my flexibility stinks and I can never get my butt down far enough to form the clean, straight line from my shoulders to my heel. It’s just not body I was given. What I lack in bendiness, though, I more than make up for in resourcefulness, that is, finding more affirming yoga classes. One particularly generous instructor smiled at me and used me as an example to reassure the whole class that it’s okay. After all, she said sagely, there are no straight lines in nature.
She meant this, as I think most people do, almost as an act of forgiveness. It gives us permission to let go of perfection, to embrace the biomorphic curves of bellies and sunflower swirls and even the horizon itself. As the Romantics taught us in the 19th century, we shouldn’t expect our internal and external nature to be rational – there are hormonal freak-outs, there are hurricanes. You wouldn’t believe how many daily meditation websites cite the idea of no straight lines in nature as an affirmation of our fundamental humanness. And while I fully support cutting ourselves some slack, it’s also a little unfair, a little reductive, really, to the straight line itself, making it seem all body-shaming and inorganic, holding up its clean, rational tidiness as necessarily lacking in feeling or humanity. Because if you ask 104-year-old Cuban-American painter Carmen Herrera, it’s been her dearest companion, and, moreover, a thing of pure, unparalleled, infinite beauty.
Herrera’s daily life is a one of humane rationalism. She starts with a café con leche, and then sits at her work table in the New York loft she’s lived in for half a century, a row of marking pens and rulers at the ready, her long fingers filling in graph paper with geometric shapes that she’ll stare at critically and then decide if it’s worth turning into a larger canvas with the help of her assistants. She is, in her words, eternally looking for variations on the straight line, on all the different ways its dynamic energy can be captured. And you get the sense, when you look at this painting, number one from her series Blanco y Verde, White and Green, that she has actually figured out how to make a static line flicker, blink, pulse, and the viewer along with it. The span across the canvas means that you can’t actually take both of the needle-pointed triangles in with your whole eye. Your pupils end up darting back and forth like you’re watching a tennis match. And it makes you want to tip your hat to this arthritic and wheelchair-bound artist who has still just calmly and rationally infused your day with a surge of visual energy.
And I want to return to two words I raised at the top, infinity and reduction, because both play a role in how we understand, and misunderstand, both Herrera and her work.
In this painting, infinity and reduction are present almost immediately. You can’t help but experience both as it gently sucks you into its vortex. The painting is the first of a series from the 1960s, which she has called her most significant, when she was inspired by a very real thing – the horizon line of a landscape – but curious as to how stripped down it could be and still be visually effective, still be a horizon, and everything that we know a horizon to be: far away, receding, infinite. It’s so much a horizon, in fact, that it’s stabilizing. You know exactly where you are, like it’s guiding you home. It’s weirdly comforting. It holds you. Which is a pretty big accomplishment for a white canvas with a couple of green triangles, and puts its finger squarely on the significance of her work, which is about reducing form down to, as they say in the business world, the minimum viable product – the least possible amount of image to still be representative of the thing. And we all know that the shortest distance between two points, both in nature and in metaphor – is a straight line. So she reduces and reduces and then reduces some more. Her work is a picture of visual austerity, of the less-is-more Mies Van Der Rohe philosophy that we looked at in episode 38 on the Bauhaus. She calls this her process of purification. “I’ll think I’m finished,” she says, “but then I take something out and it’s even better.”
And yet, there’s an astonishing amount contained in something so minimal. Critics have described the quiet jazz present in her shapes, the “optical charge” the counterbalances “a meditative, metaphorical weight.” And it’s so clear to us, in these two sharp, skinny triangles, that there’s a tremendous sense of recession and depth, the distance of a horizon that moves away from us while we stand rooted in our space. It’s so incredible how much eye-catching visual energy can be present in what otherwise seems so simple: just blocks of flat colored-in shapes on large canvases. And, as we’ll see, this was exactly what Herrera and her cohort of fellow Hard-Edge Abstract painters were experimenting with in American in the middle of the 20th century. Of course, they didn’t realize at the time that they were indeed her cohort, or how influential her work was. But we’ll come back to that.
So what is hard-edge painting anyway? Strictly defined, it’s when one full, bold, color transitions abruptly into another, creating a sharp, clear division between flat geometric lines and shapes, that are then arranged on the canvas, distinct from one another as colored blocks. Think of it as the polar opposite of the multi-layered, luminescent Mark Rothko dissolve from color to color. And you might look at a hard-edge painting and think that it’s the epitome of “my seven-year-old could do that” – assuming, of course, your seven-year-old had painter’s tape and infinite patience – but moreover, struggle to understand why it’s anything profound, or even art at all. But like most 20th century art movements, to understand it is to understand what came before it, which was, in this case, Abstract Expressionism. When we looked at Jackson Pollock in episode 12, and then at Rothko in episode 24, we dove into the souls of deeply emotive painters pouring and spattering and diffusing their subjective selves all over the canvas. Think about Pollock’s gestural actual painting, the drip of pure expressiveness, the fling of the artist’s arm. Think about Rothko’s soulful meditation as he built up his layers of paint. Abstract Expressionist paintings positively reek of the angst of their painters. And as a response, a group of largely male West Coast painters – painters like Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, and, as we now know, female New Yorker Carmen Herrera – decided that there was more value in paint application that was a little more impersonal, a little more rational, a more whimsical exploration of color and form. The hard-edge painters emphasized the two-dimensionality of the canvas, and invited a primarily visual, rather than an emotional, response to the colors and shapes. Just because a straight line was tidy doesn’t make it fascist, they argued. Just because the complete lack of straight lines had you fetal on the floor, covered in Pollock’s drips, doesn’t mean that introducing them back in was inorganic, any less human.
Furthermore, when it comes to hard-edge painting, and to our response to it, the form, as Ellsworth Kelly says, is the content. The form is the content. I know that sounds like opaque artspeak, but it’s actually not that mystifying. It speaks to both the visual experience of these interplaying of geometric forms – in other words, how our eyes dance as we see Herrera’s triangles recess and almost touch – and in the fact that these paintings themselves become objects. So what do I mean by this? Well, when we think of paintings, we think of being invited into a narrative, like flipping on a TV. We seldom think of the canvas or the stretcher bars or the pigment – they’re all just in the service of the narrative, the vehicles used to tell a story. But the abstract painters of the 20th century, painters like Piet Mondrian and the Suprematists – both of whom we looked at in episode 10 and whom the Hard-Edgers themselves were influenced by, started to see all these components – canvas, frame, pigment – as a key part of the art object. Taken together, they comprise a kind of two-dimensional sculpture, first emphasizing the flatness of a canvas and then playing with shapes upon that flatness to intrigue the eye.
And if this is still confusing, let’s look again at Blanco y Verde. There’s nothing compelling in theory about two green triangles on a white canvas. Again, it’s nothing your freakishly anal seven-year-old couldn’t do. But if we allow for the fact that a canvas is a flat, two-dimensional object, and if we position these triangles on the canvas just so – which, more than anything, is clearly Herrera’s real gift – and if we already have a sense of what a recessed horizon is like in our heads, and if we stand in front of this painting, begging the triangles to touch and knowing they never will, then suddenly we’re having, as my dad would say, a real moment here. The triangles, intellectually, play the role we’re projecting onto them, that is, they create a horizon line, and, visually, they begin to vibrate, flicker, hum, not unlike the dynamic equilibrium of a Mondrian. The particular hues of green and white play off of each other, as Herrera has described, like a yes and a no. All of the components of the painting – the flatness, the pigment, the size – come together to become the experience of it; they’re not just the means to convey the quote unquote “story” the painting is telling. So when Kelly describes the form as the content, and when we find out that Herrera herself was trained as a sculptor, we have a much better understanding of what these artists are trying to do. And all we as viewers need to appreciate it, again, harkening back to the episode on Mondrian, is a chair.
So now that we’ve put hard-edge in context, let’s focus our attention back on Herrera. She’s only now getting her due as a key player in the movement, a half-century late and untold dollars short. And this brings us back to our starting point. What do the concepts of infinity and reduction mean to Carmen Herrera specifically? The idea of infinity is kind of metaphorical – she just keeps going, living this seemingly never-ending life, still in her creative prime at the staggering age of 104, with no signs of stopping anytime soon. But the reduction is very, very clear, because it’s a short distance between reduction and reductive, between simplifying something down to its essentials and crudely oversimplifying. And the art world has been crudely oversimplifying Herrera her whole life.
It began during the period around when she created this painting. Herrera, born in Havana in 1915, but trained bouncing between Havana, Paris, and New York, moved with her husband to Paris in 1948 and spent the next five years there, moving in the same circles as hugely famous artists and writers and befriending them all. While there, she grew especially close to Ellsworth Kelly, explored the abstracts of the Bauhaus, the Suprematists, and Mondrian, and the rest, as we’ve just discussed, is hard-edged history. But when she returned to New York in 1953, straight into the heyday of the Abstract Expressionism, she realized what it meant to be a woman in this male-dominated artist circle. What it meant to be reduced to just being a woman artist. And it was particularly galling because, as she argued, there’s nothing decidedly feminine about her work. You could even make the case, as curators have, that it’s defiantly unfeminine – meaning that, if we, too, are going to be reductive about it, her work is strong, rational, decisive. These aren’t domestic scenes of tea services and pink-cheeked children. But the quality and subject of her work didn’t stop a gallerist telling her, point blank, that even though she could paint rings around the male artists exhibited, she wasn’t going to get show because she was a woman. It’s just the way it was.
Her luck turned, eventually, after a seemingly infinite wait. “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.”
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 at the age of 89. And from there, she’s been labeled the discovery of the decade. Retrospectives, solo shows, from the Whitney to MoMA, works in permanent collections in major museums, Netflix documentaries, all the splashiest 21st century markers of a fine artist’s success. But there’s her work, and then there’s her story, and again, we need to be aware of how reductive her story becomes in the excitement of its retellings. Look at how badly this woman artist was treated all because she was a woman. The injustice of it, calling so much attention to this woman’s womanness as a filter through which her art is viewed. Thank God we’ve learned so much since then.
Fortunately, though, we’ve got Herrera herself keeping us honest. She has no interest in labels, and resists them at every opportunity. No one cares about ages, backgrounds, or sex of Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella. People care about whether or not the dudes can paint. And so, she says, don’t refer to her as a woman artist, or a Latin American artist, or a really, really old artist. She more than the reductive sum of those parts. She’s an artist. Let the work speak for her. Or, better yet, let it speak for itself, as it has for the better part of the last century, and as it will continue to, tomorrow morning, when Herrera, an overlooked artist who will now live on in collections forever, sips her café con leche, and then goes to work, inhaling the sticky sweetness of her sharpies, and showing us the seemingly infinite ways we have permission to find the beauty in a straight line.