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Portrait de Madame H., 1912

Between 1911 and 1912 Auguste Herbin painted four picturesofMadame H…¹ In those he took as a model his companion and then spouse, Louise Bailleux.But, even by the accuracy in similarities that they resemble, the physiognomic differences tell us that the painter is treating the feminine picture as the gender and not as the capture of a concrete character.We could say that the exercise made by Herbin has a sort of connection with the one made by Picasso through Fernande Oliver in Horta of Ebro several years prior.If this is true, we could affirm that in Her bin’s work the encounter between aesthetic cubist and the feminine portrait as a pictorial gender started in 1910 with The Chappeau Female and ended in 1913 with the portrait of Miss A.S.

Within the parameters that we use to discuss about cubism, it could be say that Herbin trying to avoid the syntax of the analytic cubism set forth rapidly the possibilities of the synthetic cubism.This leap with respect to the established evolution of cubism in the pioneer group from Montmartre, from which Herbin was part of, has been outlined with revealing intensity by Geneviene Claisse²and it has composed one of the reasons for the lack of understanding of Her bin’s work.The reasons that took the painter to undertake a slanting path in his cubist trajectory were merely personal, but not arbitrary: they obeyed to a aesthetic creed in which the primary relations were colour and form from specific foundations and the artist’s subsequent trajectory made evident this fact. Herbin was not just a mere cubisteur how he is usually called, instead a creator that arranged the cubist principles, cubist principles that he had accomplished in 1909 from a pure personal evolution, to the paradigmatic demands of his talent as a painter.

Likewise, in all Herbin´s series of feminine portraits he used mixed prints suggesting a coetaneous diversity of searches and performances that is not exclusively his style, but that is also noticeable in Gris, Gleizes or Metzinger.In the early oil paintings from 1910, la femme au chapeau (Claisse, nº 219), Herbin apparently kept the traditional vision that is produced by a female leaning on a table. I mean apparently because in reality all the figurative motive appears presented by the articulation of acute triangle and irregular parallelograms in which the intensity of colour with flat hues plays a special role on the definition of space.Therefore, the painting beyond its figurativeevidence, it holds an abstract conception as well.It seems like evidently with another character, Herbin wanted to continue with the cubist experience initially suggested by Picasso in the Les demoiselles d’Avignon and in the Nu à la drapèrie travelling a journey that remain impassable, but that he was especially interested in.However, two years later in 1912, in Madame H… au chapeau (Claisse, nº 219) having developed something similar to the analytic cubism just in specific landscapes and still lifes, Herbin anticipated or he was strictly contemporary of the formulas of what is knowntoday as synthetic cubism.To do that the painter had changed his pictorial technique moving from the flat application of paint to fragmented brushstrokes in wrought steps, showing as a whole somethingclose to Gris’s Works in 1912, especially by the confection of canvas through which the systematic articulation of diagonal planes that converge with other vertical and horizontal planes.But in both cases, the painting of 1910 as well as the one from 1912, even done by different procedures, it seems like that Herbin was not interested in the integral disarticulation of shapes (like most of the cubists of the moment), instead in the integral restitution through mechanisms that did not respond to vision but to theconception; without any doubts this conception was supported by the free usage of geometry and by the capacity of colour to be express by itself without implying subjective or expressionist faculties.In other words, Herbin soon conceived the possibility of the cubism as pro art form.

Probably it was for this capacity to being able to conceive the cubism as pro art form from plastic objective resources the reason why the painter managed to anticipate the another `path of the cubist aesthetic; indeed proposing in some texts fundamental theories of this movement, but that in reality was not done in painting until the modern historical circumstances substantially changed.In two Portrait de Madame H… made in 1911 and 1912 (Claisse numbers 242 and 248 respectively), Herbin clearly proposed the way in which the cubist aesthetic could derive in the attainment of the classicism.A new classicism that was purely understood in terms purely formal, Wölfflinianos, if one wants, and not only in or historic terms, this link between cubism and the new classicism has been the aim of several studies in the decades of 1980 and 1990, but few times, even better, Herbin´s work has never being acknowledged in connection to this fact.Perhaps it has being that way just for ignorance.In either case, the early encounter formulated by Herbin of cubism and classicism is very different for the one giving by Andre Lhote, in reality, Lhote subjects to geometrized simplification the conventional figuration while Herbin deduce from the reduction in abstract planes of the figurative a new figurative architecture based on the norm, the concentration and the densification of the composed structure.And the plastic meaning of these two portrait de Madame H… we founded again in Femme asssise from 1912 (Claisse, nº282).While the nude of the previous compositions provided hints about the identification of the classic conceptualism, in la Femme assise, even more cubistic in its treatment, what we find for the environmental contemporary of the person painted, a truly advancement by Herbin that fifteen years later could had become one of the major representatives of the new European objective realism.

Some still lifes from 1911’s and 1912’s, in replica to the Herbin more inclined to the abstraction, also showed a similar tension between the cubist idiom and the virtuality of the new classicism.But Herbin did not continue this journey at that moment. The Portrait of Mademoiselle A.S…, of 1913 (Claisse, nº319), entailed a certain turn to the principles of the so called synthetic cubism, within the context of an artist that in Céret, accompanied by Picasso and Braque, and numerous landscapes paintings, will stress his innate tendency to the abstract conception of canvas and the relationships between form and colour.

The Portrait of Madame H…, made in 1912 (Claisse, nº 281), now in the places of the Art Collection of Telefonica Foundation, it has the quality of being a synthesis of diversity shown by the painter in his feminine paintings of these times.Herbin seems unaware to the identification between depth and figure typical of the so called analytic cubism, as well as the random concurrence of coloured planes common of the synthetic cubism, but even so the work holds both records.Favouring, a powerful gesture of the represented model that it communicates eagerly with the spectator, Herbin homogenized the relation between depth and figure through a similar plastic treatment.The whole composition is lined in the same register record that combines the geometric forms with rich chromatic brushstrokes, measured with the same gesture of the brush and with similar intensity in all its applications.Through this procedure, Herbin does not geometrized a natural model, but instead by the conjunction of prismatic syncopated forms brings to the surface the female figure as well all the elements that accompany her.Although different in his outcomes, the aesthetic principle that Herbin promotes in this painting is compared with what Gris would had made in similar times; to go from the general to the particular and to make from the geometric form a figure and not the contrary.This is the reason why in this painting like in his previously mentioned works, Herbin owns one of the more decisive principles of cubism.The sensation of deepness is defined by the articulation of volumes not by the optic perspective that does not exist in the picture.The multiple facets incorporate the changing sequence of points of view.Despite of the recognizable aspect of what is represented, the abstract conception stands by the demands of mimesis.Lastly, again it is the feeling of colour, his noticeable colour presence what distinguishes Herbin from his coetaneous.Speaking of Herbin’s feeling of colour, Waldemar George, one of the critics of the historic avant-gardes that appreciated the most this artist. He wrote «after confirming that the impressionism, the fauvism even the cubism disassociated the colour and the form, Auguste Herbin opposed the perspective expression of the colours versus the lineal perspective in other words.The antinomy of these two perspectives provoked conflicts that neither Cézame or Matisse or Braque managed to resolve.If Herbin settled them was because he painted by aplats and he used flat forms in the production of all his works.The colour takes priority over the form»³. furthermore, the critic added that as Herbin used to quote Goethe in the theory of colours, when the German poet affirmed that only through light and colour was possible to manifest to the human eye the last experience of nature.E. C.

SIGNED

On the base of the frame.

Private Collection, Nether Lands / Private Collection, Paris / Lina Davidov, Paris.

Auguste Herbin, Paris, Modern Gallery, Clovis Sagot, 1914 / Cubism, Chicago, Main Street Gallery, 1953

CLAISSE, GENEVIENVE, Hervin. Catalogue raisonné de L’œuvre peint, Paris and Lausana, La Bibliothéque de Arts and les Éditions du Grand-pont: Reproduced: nº281, p. 328.

(1) It refers to the cathaloges by GENEVIÉVE CLAISSE, Herbin.Cathalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint Paris and Lausana, La Blibliothèque des Arts and Les Éditions du Grand-Pont, 1993, page numbers, 242,278,279, and 281.In the writing every time the author is quoted, it refers to the cathalogue..

(2) See footnote 2.

(3) GEORGES, WALDEMAR, La doctrine, op. Quote., p. 213.