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Biografy

Auguste Herbin
(Quiévy, 1882- París, 1960)

From the Darwinist point of view or the strictly evolutionary approach that the modern art historians usually apply, few creators that began their work at the moment of the historic vanguards manage to survive artistically at such determined moment within the time of their own production.Auguste Hervin had the fortune of being one exception to this questionable historiographical rule.

Just at the time of World War I, the creators and followers of Concrete Art- and the artists and critics gathered in connection with the Denise Rene gallery- recovered their style and work breaking successfully some outlined standards. However, for a strange paradox the excited Herbin by the Concrete Art concealed the variables of a coherent but a complex trajectory.Fortunately, for more than a decade, and thanks to the works of Genevieve Claisse or Serge Lemoin, Herbin's place in the foundation of modern art has been regained successfully emphasizing again especially everything related to the important role that this artist performed in the creation of cubist art.

Son of a working class textile family Auguste Herbin was born in Quievy, a small place nearby Cateau-Cambresis, on April 29 1882.Actually, he was the same age as Braque and just a year younger than Picasso.Thanks to his family's great economic efforts, the young Hervin was able to join the Lille Academy de Bellas of Art, but his early and diligent interest for the impressionist painting stele made him to enter in conflict with professors and schoolmates.One could say that Herbin was an autodidact, although it did not interfere with it, but instead stimulated a progressive intellectual tone of his character and his aptitude regarding creation, an intellectual character that would augment during his trajectory.

After he was established in Paris in 1901, he met Wilhelm and Clovis Sagot in 1904, who acquired his first works.For then, Herbin had practiced an excited impressionism in chromatics and brushstroke that in some aspects and without any doubts it anticipated fauvist solutions.However, between 1905 and 1908 Herbin's work received two parallel records; on one side he assumed abstract valuations from the chromatic shades the other side, he introduced the geometry and simplification of forms in portrait pictures and landscapes. Even though he was already established in his own way of doing, his position in those years, it is actually compared to Braque and Derain.

In 1909, Herbin had moved to Bateau-Lavoir. His closeness to Picasso and Braque and then, later on to Gris was immediately and it can be say that the painter participated in the birth and development of the cubism maintaining an intense contact with Picasso, even when he moved to live to Boulevard de Cliny.By being close to Gris, Metzinger or Gleizes between 1911 and 1914 Herbin's cubism disjoined rapidly the differences between what we called conventionally analytic cubism and synthetic cubism , conciliating changeable formulas that fluctuated between the geometrized translation of motives and the meeting between the cubism and the abstract; in the latter aspect Herbin was really a pioneer.

Moved by the burst of World War I, Herbin dedicated great portion of his time decorating the military field chapel of Mailly-en-Champegne and carrying out camouflage for warlike material.However, in the middle of the battle, his contact with the atmospheres that made cubism endure was increased by signing a sole contract with Leonce Rosenberg in 1916.His work searched deeper then by the abstract reconsideration of vegetable by the time that a great number of his pieces from then were closed to the purism postulates or made him free again up to the meeting point of cubist heritage and abstraction.

Towards 1919 Herbin was interested in the monumental plastic qualities and he began to make after 1920 his first paintings over mortar and engraved wood; works curiously close to what is called the second futurism, in which the artist introduced a new meaning of the modern totem that nevertheless was not well accepted by the critics.

In 1921 Herbin's cubist work was appraised higher than Leger or Braque, however, the artist in order to overcome certain moments of impasse, decided to give a turn to his work.Between 1922 and 1926 he produced one of the most original formulas of the new European realism.It was not just a mere deep search into the return to order .Herbin met satisfactory Roh's relative criterion that not until he made the art abstract was able to blossom the sensation of the figure, the nature and the object.And effectively, without getting out from the descriptive, Herbin's novorrealistas representations were blended by the conceptual.

After this stage, the artist took up again the abstraction around 1925 or 1926.This time based on very dynamic organic forms in which he gradually introduced arabesque in black line.In 1931 was Herbin's determination what made the A bstraction- Creation appear, fulfilling an important artistic place in opposition to the surrealism.In the 1940's, similarly to many other contemporary abstract artists, Herbin linked the possibilities of abstraction with the attention of an esoteric thought (Steiner, Washmuth, Wronski), reaching to codify a plastic alphabet of correspondence between letters, forms and colours.With allthe accumulated baggage from post-war II, the mentioned artist's recovery was produced by young creators of the Concrete Artand within this scope and as a holder of an unusual recognition, Herbin was able to develop his master piece, even by overcoming health problems, including his death in 1960, when he was 78 years old. E. C.