Herbin was born in Quiévy, Nord. His father was a craftsman. Herbin studied drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts de Lille, from 1899 to 1901, when he settled in Paris.
Auguste Herbin, Le pont de fer (Iron Bridge), 1911, oil on canvas, 63.5 x 80 cm
In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, he was exempted from military service because of his short stature and was committed to work in an airplane factory near Paris.[1]
After producing his first abstract paintings in 1917, Herbin came to the attention of Léonce Rosenberg who, after World War I, made him part of the group centred on his Galerie de l'Effort Moderne and exhibited his work there on several occasions in March 1918 and 1921. Herbin's radical reliefs of simple geometric forms in painted wood, such as Colored Wood Relief (1921; Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne), challenged not only the status of the easel painting but also traditional figure–ground relationships. The incomprehension that greeted these reliefs and related furniture designs, even from those critics most favorably disposed towards Cubism, was such that until 1926 or 1927 he followed Rosenberg's advice to return to a representational style and produced paintings in the New Objectivity style.
Auguste Herbin, Galerie de L’Effort Moderne, March 1918
Herbin himself later disowned his landscapes, still lifes and genre scenes of this period, such as Bowls Players (1923; Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne), in which the objects were depicted as schematized volumes. Under the influence of surrealism, he became increasingly critical of the rational forms employed by De Stijl. After 1927, Herbin becomes interested by microphotographs of crystals and plants and completely abandons figurative painting.[1]
Beginning in 1942, Herbin developed a language of form and color, his "alphabet plastique". Increasingly, his paintings consist only of colorful arrangements of triangles, circles and rectangles. In 1946, he was one of the founders of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, a successor of Abstraction-Création. He later served as the group's vice-president.
Late life and death
After 1953, Herbin was paralyzed on the right side, forcing him to paint with the left hand. He died in Paris on 31 January 1960. One painting remained unfinished—the motif of the painting was constructed on the word Fin.[2]
During the 2000s, an important series of original Herbin's signed rugs have been realised by Didier Marien from the Boccara Gallery with the agreement of the rights holders.[3] Those rugs exhibited in France, but also in Moscow, London and New York played a key role in the worldwide rediscovery of Herbin's artistic creations.
Public collections
Among the public collections holding works by Auguste Herbin are:
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