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Born in a village near Cateau-Cambrésis in 1882, Auguste Herbin joined the 1st municipal drawing school there at the age of 14.

He attended the school for 4 years, winning several medals and a merit scholarship from the municipality to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Lille under Pharaon de Winter. He entered the school in 1900.

Right from the start, he was at ease in all genres and handled the brush with great talent: precision and delicacy, subtlety and harmony in the choice of colors, balance in the compositions.

During a study trip to Bruges, he discovered Impressionism.

His attraction to this movement brought him into conflict with his teacher, who he found too academic, and so in 1901 he left Lille to pursue a career in Paris.

His strength: following his intuition.

After his first works, which were part of the post-Impressionist movement, he became one of the first Fauves.

And by 1908, he was considered one of the precursors of Cubism.

Less than a year elapsed between his Portrait de jeune fille, a Fauvist painting from 1907, and Portrait de femme aux cheveux rouges, a painting that was already Cubist.

Everything is moving very fast. Society is evolving, and seems to want to break away from academicism. Modernity was sought in every field.

Auguste Herbin is one of the inventors of cubism, in the same way as Picasso, Braque and Gris.

Herbin was not a “worldly” artist, and attended few or no artists’ gatherings.

On the other hand, he read widely, keeping abreast of the advances of his time, with a preference for philosophy and poetry.

Wilhelm Uhde, a great collector and admirer of Herbin, wrote: “His painting is not an ‘interesting’ thing, but great and beautiful; it does not occupy our intelligence with cerebral endeavors, but evokes ours with its passion. First and foremost, it is our hearts that thank him. (cf. catalog of the “Herbin” exhibition, galerie Clovis Sagot, 1908).

Herbin’s painting undeniably had a profound effect on the public.

From his earliest cubist canvases, Herbin’s painting was already moving in the direction of synthesis and simplification, a first step towards abstract art.

Disappointed by the failure of his project for monumental works, in which he had set his heart on touching all materials, he took a break from figurative art before turning definitively to abstract art, then paving the way for modern art.

As early as 1919, when Herbin broke with Cubism, he embarked on an unprecedented abstraction with his first Dancer.

In his book L’art non-figuratif non-objectif, he expresses his desire to “materialize the spirit and spiritualize matter”.

During the Second World War, the color theories of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and the broader pseudoscientific insights of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), founder of the Anthroposophical Society, nourish his thinking.

He was definitively enlightened by listening to Bach’s last fugue, written on the four notes designated by the four letters: B, A, C, H.

Thus he developed a “plastic alphabet”, which he conceived as a universal language, combining geometric shapes, letters of the alphabet, colors and musical notes.

These different components enable him to design his paintings using carefully chosen names that become the titles of his works (Rain, Perfume, Unity, Island, etc.).

“I adopted (…) this method to have the unlimited possibility of creation and renewal”, he writes.

The revolutionary idea is the renunciation of the object, of figuration.

By eliminating the figure, painting paradoxically achieves absolute freedom, creativity and expressiveness.

A decisive method for the revival of geometric abstract art.

Although he fell into oblivion by the time of his death in 1960, he was twice as popular as Georges Braque, and recognized well before Fernand Léger.

He was supported by dealers such as Léonce Rosenberg and Denise René, and collected by collectors such as Sergei Shchukin and Wilhelm Uhde.

Works by Auguste Herbin are on display at the Musée Matisse in Le Cateau-Cambrésis.

In 1931, in collaboration with Georges Vantongerloo, he founded the Abstraction-Création group.

From 1946, he was one of the co-founders of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, of which he was vice-president.

In 1949, he published his book “L’art non-figuratif non-objectif”.

His paintings are among the finest in the history of abstract art.

The Musée de Montmartre has devoted a superb exhibition to this fabulous artist, “Auguste Herbin, le maître révélé”, from March 15 to September 15, 2024.

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