Auguste Herbin
1882-1960 | French

Composition sur le nom Herbin

Signed and dated 'Herbin 1942' (lower right)
Oil on canvas

This bold and vivid abstract oil on canvas was painted by French painter Auguste Herbin, a pioneer in popularizing Modernist abstraction. Over his expansive nearly 60-year career, Herbin rubbed shoulders with art history greats from Pablo Picasso to Georges Braque while honing his personal and innovative style. With a daring color palette and crisp composition, Composition sur le nom Herbin, represents a transformative moment in the artist's career.

Painted in 1942, Composition sur le nom Herbin embodies Herbin’s fully-formed artistic aesthetic and stylistic tenets. He developed his “alphabet plastique” that same year, a synergistic visual language of color and form that he described in detail in his published book L’art non-figuratif non-objectif. Though the artist was highly cerebral in his process of creating art, Composition sur le nom Herbin's magnetism is palpable. The geometric shapes visible in the composition — primarily crescents and circles — are rendered in bold oranges, purples and yellows on a deep blue background. The array of astral motifs creates a dynamic sense of movement, as if to capture planets orbiting around the central solar form.

Auguste Herbin began his artistic training at the École des Beaux-Arts de Lille before moving to Paris in 1901. In the early years of his career, he experimented with a variety of styles, exhibiting Post-Impressionistic works at the Salon des Indépendants in 1906 and Fauvist paintings at the Salon d'Automne in 1907. After a brief Cubist period following his introduction to Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Otto Freundlich, Herbin co-founded his own artistic movement in the 1930s: the Abstraction-Création group in Paris. Devoted to encouraging abstract art as a response to the representational tenets of the Surrealist movement, then led by André Breton, Herbin served as the publisher and author for the group's eponymous art journal. Today, Herbin’s work resides in prestigious private collections and museum institutions around the globe, including the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others.

This painting is pictured in Herbin, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint by Geneviève Claisse, page 420.

Painted 1942