Carmen Herrera was 106 when she died in her Manhattan loft where she had worked for more than half a century, creating a lifetime’s worth of abstract art that went almost entirely overlooked until her life was nearly over.
Herrera, who was born in Cuba in 1915 and trained in Paris in the aftermath of the Second World War, anticipated the artistic movement known as minimalism with her use of straight lines and geometric shapes. She exhibited her works occasionally over the years but did not sell her first painting until 2004, when a show at the Latin Collector gallery in New York helped propel her to sudden renown.
