Biographie

1882–1960

Auguste Herbin was born in 1882 in Cateau-Cam­bré­sis, North­ern France, known as the birth-city of Hen­ri Matisse. Herbin was the son of weavers and as such, at a young age he took cours­es in indus­tri­al design. Sub­se­quent­ly Herbin stud­ied at the ‘École des Beaux-Arts’ in Lille, before mov­ing to Paris in 1901. Ini­tial­ly Herbin styl­is­ti­cal­ly adhered to Post-Impressionism.
In 1906 Herbin adopt­ed the Fau­vism palette, as wit­nessed in his won­der­ful paint­ings ‘Rue de Bas­tia’ and ‘Le matin, Corse’ made dur­ing a trip to Cor­si­ca in 1907, and ‘La place Maubert’, paint­ed the same year in Paris.

Herbin turned towards Cubism in 1909, when he moved to the Bateau-Lavoir stu­dios and met its inhab­i­tants Pablo Picas­so, Georges Braque and Juan Gris. Herbin’s land­scapes paint­ed in the North of France bear tes­ti­mo­ny to his Cubist exper­i­ments dur­ing 1908–1910.
In 1910, Herbin exhib­it­ed at the ‘Salon des Indépen­dants’ in the same room as Jean Met­zinger, Albert Gleizes et Fer­nand Léger. In 1912, Herbin par­tic­i­pat­ed in the exhi­bi­tion of the ‘Sec­tion d’Or’, the largest and most impor­tant pub­lic show­ing of Cubist works pri­or to the Great War. The same year he exhib­it­ed in Berlin and in 1913 at the Armory Show in New-York.
In 1913 Herbin paint­ed Cubist views of Céret in the South of France along­side Pablo Picas­so, Juan Gris and Max Jacob. Being mobilised dur­ing the Great War, Herbin regained the stu­dio in 1917. Slow­ly but sure­ly, his Cubist style devel­oped into Abstrac­tion. Léonce Rosen­berg signed him up and exhib­it­ed his work reg­u­lar­ly in his gallery ‘l’Effort Mod­erne’ dur­ing 1918 — 1921.
Dur­ing the 1920s, Herbin pro­duced a series of mon­u­men­tal objects and geo­met­ri­cal paint­ings in the form of wood reliefs which the pub­lic and crit­ics reject­ed vehe­ment­ly. Sub­se­quent­ly, Herbin returned to Cateau-Cam­bré­sis where he prac­ticed dur­ing 1922 — 1925 a sim­pli­fied ver­sion of Fig­u­ra­tion – a move he lat­er regretted.
Final­ly, in 1926 Herbin found his call­ing in geo­met­ri­cal Abstrac­tion as shown in his paint­ings built up of round shapes and undu­la­tions, in colours which are neat­ly and flat­ly applied. In 1936 Herbin added squares and tri­an­gles exe­cut­ed in increas­ing­ly vivid colours.

In 1929, Herbin co-found­ed the ‘Salon des Surindépen­dants’, before cre­at­ing the ‘Abstrac­tion-Créa­tion’ group with Bel­gian painter Georges Van­tonger­loo. Their objec­tive was to pro­mote Abstrac­tion to counter-lev­el the 1920s revival of Neo-Clas­si­cal fig­u­ra­tion and to con­tain the strong influ­ence of the Surrealists.

The group ‘Abstrac­tion-Créa­tion’ exist­ed from 1932 until 1936 and was incor­po­rat­ed into the ‘Salon des Réal­ités Nou­velles’ insti­gat­ed by Robert and Sonia Delau­nay in 1939. In 1946, the Salon des Réal­ités Nou­velles’ was offi­cial­ly estab­lished as a suc­ces­sor to ‘Abstrac­tion-Créa­tion’.
Dur­ing the same year of 1946, Herbin cre­at­ed his so-called ‘alpha­bet plas­tique’, a method of com­po­si­tion based on a reper­to­ry of par­al­lels between let­ters, geo­met­ric forms, colours and sounds. Thus, his paint­ings were com­posed from a word which became the title of the paint­ing. In 1949, Herbin explained his method in detail in a book enti­tled L’art non fig­u­ratif, non objec­tif. This sem­i­nal pub­li­ca­tion, and the con­fer­ences at the ‘l’Atelier d’Art Abstrait’ it entailed, as well as Herbin’s pres­i­den­cy of the ‘Salon des Réal­ités Nou­velles’ dur­ing 1946–1955, made Herbin a point of ref­er­ence for all sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion prac­ti­tion­ers of Abstrac­tion such as Vic­tor Vasare­ly and Richard Mortensen, and the upcom­ing Kinet­ic artists of the late 1940s.
Auguste Herbin died in Paris in 1960.