Auguste Herbin

“Like long echoes that merge from afar
In a dark and deep unity,
Vast as the night and as the light,
Scents, colors and sounds respond to each other »

*Charles Baudelaire

In 1913, the date of the cubist painting Le chêne liège presented in this exhibition, Herbin’s path through the history of the European avant-garde is already significant. Taking as his starting point, at the very beginning of the twentieth century, Van Gogh and Cézanne who would be his only masters, on the eve of the First World War, Herbin already had an international career supported by his first dealers. Fauve painter then cubist, he exhibited several times in Germany, Switzerland and Holland through Wilhelm Uhde, as well as in England, this time through Clovis Sagot. In 1913 Herbin was a recognized Cubist painter; his painting embodies modernity, his frank colors, his audacity in the deconstruction of the object and the representation of reality even mean that one of his landscapes from 1910 is mocked by an English magazine, The Tatler. He cuts one of his paintings into three parts, and gives each a title which changes the subject to mock the way in which Herbin reproduces nature. In 1908 he already told the American art critic Gelett Burgess: “I do not distort nature. I sacrifice it to a higher form of beauty and to a decorative unity”.

In addition to the primacy given to color, the latter’s cubist paintings and drawings show a strong taste for geometry which will increase over the years. The Composition à la cruche from 1917 which represents a half-jug in its center shows a surface occupied by geometric colored planes composed of triangles, rectangles and parallelepipeds which are distinguished from each other by color. Apart from a slight gradient on the outline of the jug, there are no or very few volume effects, no illusionist perspective, no decomposition of the object into facets, as with many Cubists, but a great dynamism born from the arrangement of the shapes of plane geometry between them.

This way of creating movement using only geometric shapes will become more accentuated over the years and the period of monumental objects from 1918 to 1921, a unique experience in the history of French abstract art. In the Composition of 1920, which is an abstract work, the relationship between content and form tends to disappear; by asserting his taste for the decorative, in the noble sense of the term, Herbin gives preeminence to shape and color. We are only in 1920 and his journey in and towards abstract art is far from over. After a figurative period between 1922 and 1925, carried out in the spirit of the purism of Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, as well as magical realism as defined by the German art historian Franz Roh, Herbin in the thirties, through his significant commitment within the artist collective Abstraction-Création, of which he is founder with Jean Hélion, Georges Vantongerloo and Etienne Béothy, organizes, defends and promotes abstract art. The magazine of the same name edited by the association and published once a year from 1932 to 1936, circulated throughout the world, making Paris and the group’s annual exhibition the international capital of abstract art of all trends: constructivism, neoplasticism, abstract expressionism and many others including circular abstraction, as it asserts itself in Herbin’s work, through the volutes and curves which for him express a universal rhythm.

Then, at the end of the 1930s, Herbin accidentally discovered Goethe’s theory of colors, which had not been widely disseminated in France. This discovery will be decisive for him who understood, by experimenting with it from 1939, that color is expressed more intensely if it is contained in a closed form, this is the reason why the lines gradually give way with forms as in Réalité Spirituelle of 1939. In 1942 after numerous experiments and research, nourished by the works of Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Bach with whom he shared the taste for correspondences, he succeeded in creating a satisfactory method for renewing himself but also renewing the geometric abstract art which will have a considerable impact on the next generation.

If Herbin’s path in the great adventure of abstract art began at the beginning of the twentieth century with Cézanne and Van Gogh, after 1945 it was from his work that artists such as Vasarely, Soto, Agam, Baertling, Fruhtrunk and many others who all recognized this authorship, as Herbin’s generation did for Cézanne in the last century. Strangely in the exhibition if we compare Le chêne liège from 1913 and Adam et Eve from 1943 the two works seem to respond to each other as if the figurative work already contained the germ of the final work, the great work: the plastic alphabet, this is probably how we recognize the path of a giant.

Céline Berchiche, April 2024

*Charles Baudelaire, second quatrain of the poem “Correspondences”, first section “Spleen et idéal”, Les fleurs du mal 1857.