Art Basel

We weren’t expecting it anymore but it arrived ! The exhibition in a Parisian Museum by Auguste Herbin (1882-1960) is finally here ! The Musée de Montmartre is offering a retrospective, the first in Paris, of his work until September 15, 2024. In fact, to echo this retrospective, and in parallel with an exhibition that we are devoting to him at the gallery, we will offer a sample of the artist’s different periods on the booth.
Céline Berchiche, art historian, co-curator with Mario Choueiry of the retrospective at the Montmartre Museum, was kind enough to write us a text on the presentation we are making at the gallery, here is an extract : “Herbin’s path in the history of art is that of an artist from the end of the 19th century who, starting from the work of Cézanne and, with the palette of Van Gogh as his first guide, became in the second half of the 20th century a beacon for many artists whatever their nationalities, Paris from 1945 to 1955 was the great capital of international abstract art.”

After 1945, his activity within the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, the engagement with him of critics and gallery owners, his talents as a teacher contributed to a better knowledge of his great work : the plastic alphabet. Auguste Herbin is the artist who allowed geometric abstract art to renew itself and go beyond constructivist and neo-plastic syntheses. This dazzling abstract conclusion, as Victor Vasarely said, should not make us forget that with each of the movements he went through, and of which he was a contemporary, in particular Fauvism and Cubism, he left a masterful work which placed him immediately among the greatest. »

On another part of the booth we will return to the work of Alberto Magnelli (1888-1971), a Florentine painter who lived for a long time in France, to whom we devoted an exhibition in the form of a dialogue, with the work of a contemporary artist Karina Bisch. We will also offer some works by the artist from different periods, including a figurative work from the 1920s.

This exhibition commissioned at the end of 2023 at the gallery by Domitille d’Orgeval, art historian and exhibition curator, wrote about Magnelli’s work : “the painting by Magnelli executed in 1924 shows two ladies in swimsuits, illustrating through their elegance tinged with melancholy the painter’s temporary orientation towards a "return to order", this painting is an opportunity to recall that he was also a very good figurative artist and that the practice of two modes of The a priori antagonistic expression was not necessarily incompatible. Moreover, the Italian painter, at the end of his life, wrote that abstraction “bears the traces of signs that come from very far away”.