Auguste Herbin
France, 1882 - 1960
(b Quiévy, Nord, 29 April 1882; d Paris, 30–31 Jan 1960).
French painter. He studied drawing at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Lille, from 1898 to 1901, when he settled in Paris. The initial influence of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism visible in paintings that he sent to the Salon des Indépendants in 1906 gradually gave way to an involvement with Cubism after his move in 1909 to the Bateau-Lavoir studios, where he met Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris; he was also encouraged by his friendship with Wilhelm Uhde. His work was exhibited in the same room as that of Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes and Fernand Léger in the Salon des Indépendants of 1910, and in 1912 he participated in the influential Section d’Or exhibition (see Section d’or (ii)). After producing his first abstract paintings in 1917, Herbin came to the attention of Léonce Rosenberg who, after World War I, made him part of the group centred on his Gallerie de l’Effort Moderne and exhibited his work there on several occasions in 1918 and 1921. Herbin’s radical reliefs of simple geometric forms in painted wood, such as Coloured Wood Relief (1921; Paris, Pompidou), challenged not only the status of the easel painting but also traditional figure–ground relationships. The incomprehension that greeted these reliefs and related furniture designs, even from those critics most favourably disposed towards Cubism, was such that until 1926 or 1927 he followed Rosenberg’s advice to return to a representational style. Herbin himself later disowned landscapes, still-lifes and genre scenes of this period, such as Bowls Players (1923; Paris, Pompidou), in which the objects were depicted as schematized volumes.
As a member of the Communist party, Herbin found himself under pressure to practise an illustrative, moralizing art, but his resolute belief in abstraction culminated in 1931 in the creation with Georges Vantongerloo of the Abstraction-création group. Within this association Herbin’s sympathies were more with the artists who had been associated with Cercle et carré, who advocated metaphorical use of geometric forms and continued contact with nature, than with Theo van Doesburg’s concept of concrete art as an enclosed and independent system of forms. Herbin’s interest in colour theory, which dated back to 1924, led to his publication of L’art non-figuratif non-objectif (Paris, 1949), in which he established a system of correspondences between colours, forms, notes of music and letters of the alphabet which he later employed in paintings such as Friday I (1951; Paris, Pompidou). In the 1950s he initiated the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, of which he remained a member until 1955, and exerted a strong influence on a younger generation of abstract painters. During his last years he also applied his theories of abstraction to tapestry designs.
WRITINGS
L’art non-figuratif non-objectif (Paris, 1949)
VANINA COSTA
© Oxford University Press 2007
Person TypeIndividual
France, July 17, 1935 - April 30 2018
