Artist Birthday: Auguste Herbin

Auguste Herbin was one of the many French artists who were, before World War I, greatly influenced by the development of Cubism. His zest for abstraction did not abate after the war, when he became a co-founder of the avant-garde artists’ group Abstraction-Creation, artist who believed in free-form abstraction, both geometric and biomorphic.

Artist birthday for 29 April: Auguste Herbin (1882-1960 France)

Auguste Herbin was an important force in keeping alive abstraction in post-World War I painting.

Auguste Herbin, Generation, 1959, gouache and pencil on paper, 45 x 39.4 cm   Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (SI-488hrars)

In 1946 Herbin developed his "plastic alphabet", a compositional system based on the structure of letters. His color theories were partially based on Johann von Goethe's (1749-1832) The Theory of Color, in which human emotions were assigned to the colors of the spectrum. In Herbin's book Non-Figurative, Non-Objective Art (1949) he put forth his theories behind his architectural approach and color effects. His paintings from the 1950s on invariably contained a grid of rectangular shapes which housed variations on circles, triangles and squares. He was one of few French artists who consistently produced geometric abstraction throughout his career.

After the devastation of World War I (1914-1918) in Europe, some artists lost their enthusiasm for new experimentation. Cultural movements turned away from the vigorous avant-garde movements of pre-war Paris toward the values of the classical tradition. This tendency towards classicism in art in the 1920s  was a desire for stability after the upheavals of war. Despite this trend, official taste became less hostile toward modernism over time, and artists were able to consolidate and build upon the experimentation of the pre-war period.  Artists were still drawn from all over Europe to Paris, assuring its status as the capital of the art world in the West.

Abstraction-Création was an association of abstract artists set up in Paris in 1931 with the aim of promoting abstract art through group exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were Auguste Herbin and one of the founders of Dutch Constructivism (De Stijl) Georges Vantongerloo (1886-1965). The movement embraced all forms of abstraction in order to encourage modernism's continual growth, although the group tended to gravitate towards geometric abstractions such as Concrete Art, Constructivism and Neo-Plasticism. The group held regular exhibitions until 1936.

Auguste Herbin was born in Quiévy, a small town in northern France near the Belgian border. He attended the School of Fine Arts in Lille (1900-1902) before settling in Paris in 1903 near the Montmartre quarter, the center of avant-garde (new or vanguard) art. His painting before he moved to Paris was in a Neo-Impressionist and Fauvist style. In Paris he was able to study closely the evolution of Cubism (from ca. 1907 onward) by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963), which resulted in his first Cubist works in 1913.

In 1917, near the end of World War I, Herbin turned to total geometric abstraction, before discovering Constructivism. Constructivism, influenced by industrial mass production, manifested in painting in the use of stripped-down geometric forms and un-modulated simple colors. The forms were created by the use of tools such as the compass and the ruler. His Constructivist phase was interrupted briefly in 1922, when the gallery representing his abstract works recommended he return to figuration in order to make sales. He returned to abstraction in 1929 and two years later was co-founder of Abstraction-Creation. After 1938 his work moved on to a strictly two-dimensional style with simple geometric forms which evolved into his most recognizable mature style.