Auguste Herbin

The French painter Auguste Herbin (1882–1960) is recognized as a modernist revolutionary and pioneer of abstraction in France. He starts out in the first years of the new century with late-Impressionist landscapes, still lifes, and portraits that already bespeak his penchant for luminous yet harmoniously handled colors; his palette grows wild in the Fauvist phase that follows and will remain so throughout his life.

In 1907, he meets the German art critic and gallerist Wilhelm Uhde, who also introduces him to German audiences—with far-reaching consequences: his art is exhibited and collected in Germany to this day. Painting his first Cubist pictures in 1908, he ranks among the inventors of this visual idiom. His Cubist work, too, stands out for its bold colors. In 1909, he moves into a studio at the celebrated Bateau-Lavoir in Paris’s Montmartre, where Picasso and van Dongen are among his neighbors.

Herbin paints in different parts of France, from the Belgian to the Spanish border; as well as in the Belgian city of Bruges, in the port of Hamburg, and in Corsica. Each change of scenery brings perceptions of new forms, often prompting innovations in his pictorial vocabulary. It is only when he fully embraces abstract art in the 1930s that he stays in Paris for good.

During the First World War, he designs camouflage patterns for airplanes. When peace returns, he develops a completely abstract vocabulary of geometric forms for decorative wooden objects. An artist dedicated to social causes and, for some time, a member of the French Communist Party, he sees these works as a kind of monumental "art for everyone". His subsequent return to figurative painting in the magical-realist vein is not a repudiation of his earlier work but a metamorphosis; like in other shifts in his richly varied oeuvre, the old bears fruit in the new. Returning, only a few years later, to abstract painting, he begins with rounded shapes, volutes, spirals.

As an organizer of exhibitions and artists’ associations, he promotes the cause of abstract art; in 1931, he becomes president of the group Abstraction-Création. In the late 1930s, he takes an interest in theories of color and especially in anthroposophical adaptations of Goethe’s theory of colors. In 1942, these studies yield his "alphabet plastique", a set of rules for the use of pure colors and geometric shapes, musical notes and letters. He thus "spells out" words or names in pictures yet treats them creatively with a view to their inherent emotional qualities. After 1945, Herbin becomes a role model to exponents of concrete and kinetic art as well as op art, and his oeuvre is shown in numerous solo exhibitions. Until his death, he is a vital source of innovative impulses in French abstraction.

Our exhibition surveys the major stages of Herbin’s career, presenting around forty outstanding works and extensive documentation.

With generous support of Förderverein Lenbachhaus e.V.