AUGUSTE HERBIN, (1882-1960)

Paysage

Paysage
signed 'herbin.' (lower right)
oil on canvas
45.7 x 54.4cm (18 x 21 7/16in).
Painted in 1911

Provenance
Private collection (by 1993).
Anon. sale, Drouot-Richelieu, Paris, 21 April 2000, lot 38.
Nick Scheeres Collection, The Netherlands.
Acquired from the above by the present owner (circa 2006).

Exhibited
Paris, Galerie Clovis Sagot, Auguste Herbin, March 1914, no. 12.

Literature
G. Claisse, Herbin, catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Lausanne, 1993, no. 232 (illustrated p. 320).

Herbin was searching all his life.
He is not a man who is content with what he has already found.
Art like past life has no secrets.
But we never know what it will be tomorrow.
What will painting be tomorrow?
One thing is sure! He will search for it.
Like every true artist, until his very last canvas
- Anatole Jakovski

The French artist Auguste Herbin played an integral role in the artistic movements of the early twentieth century. His was a visionary career that encompassed Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism before seeking a more geometric and structural art through Constructivism, Purism and Orphism, and finally pioneering Abstract art, proclaiming the architectural purpose of painting. The present work, Paysage, is an excellent example of his shifting interest and style, wherein we simultaneously see the colourful influence of Fauvism and the modular construction of a cubist landscape.

Born in 1882 in Quiévy, near the Belgian border, Herbin was not granted the bourgeois upbringing of so many of his contemporaries. Spending a number of his formative years caring for his two siblings, whilst his parents worked in a textile factory, Herbin left school at the age of twelve and worked in a bailiff's office, spending his nights studying drawing at the cours municipal; it is this perseverance and drive that can be seen throughout his career as he sought to always develop his style and technique. Through these evening classes, Herbin displayed a remarkable talent for drawing; he learnt the techniques of drawing and painting free-hand. It was a skill that soon earned him a scholarship to Lille's Ecole des Beaux-Arts from 1899-1901, where Herbin's mastery of the Post-Impressionist painterly technique became evident, in addition to his meticulous rendering of water and sky that echoes the Flemish Renaissance.

Herbin's move to Paris in around 1902 was a truly pivotal moment in his career. After spending several years painting in isolation, engrossed in the avant-garde movements, his work began to develop into the Fauvist style. During his stay in Corsica in 1907 this became particularly prevalent; his brush and canvases from this period are loaded with flamboyant colour and expression, displaying the clear influence of the major retrospectives of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Seurat, from which Herbin had spent his time taking inspiration whilst in the nation's capital. It is certainly arguable that no exhibition would have a greater impact on Herbin than the Paul Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne later that year in 1907. It was a show that pushed younger artists in radical directions, from where they would go on to unveil and explore Modernism. This piqued Herbin's interest in Cubism and he began to experiment. In 1909 he moved to the Bateau-Lavoir studios, which were frequented by Picasso, Braque and Gris, and became fully immersed in the birth of Cubism and Synthetic-Cubism, spending much of his time working with the three artists. However, Herbin's style of Cubism remained unique, retaining the vivacity of his bright powerful Fauvist landscapes, and choosing instead to amalgamate the colour with the more sombre palette that dominated the early Cubist works. Furthermore, his forms retain their precision, becoming flattened and geometricized rather than deconstructed entirely. This inventive approach to the Cubist landscape created some his most dynamic works and firmly cemented him as a pioneer of Cubsim.

The present work is a key example of the influence that Herbin took from these fundamental moments of art history. We can clearly see the structured form that he opted to use, with the canvas being bisected from left to right by the straight road and the multitude of different components branching out from this central construct. When studying the line of trees along the roadside, leading the viewer into the distance, we immediately connect the modulation that became such a defining feature of Cézanne's method. In his own unique structural way however, Herbin has chosen to construct the tree with solid lines, forming chevrons through the treetops and breaking away from the much more wild and natural image that Cézanne would use, taking Cézanne's vision of treating nature as 'the cone, the sphere and the cylinder' almost literally. One is also tempted to draw a comparison between the upper right corner of sky and the distant Mont Sainte-Victoire, its snowy peak sitting atop a blue-grey incline, perhaps an homage to one of his great inspirations. As Anatole Jakovski notes, 'The trees themselves, their abundant leaves form strange magnetic drawings, concentric waves of colours which become distinctly more bright, even more powerful, which only obey their own rhythms dictated by Herbin and found by him...Thus, perpetually, towards integral geometry, towards absolute truth, his art advances vigorously and powerfully' (A. Jakovsky, Herbin, Paris, 1933, p. 16).

Paysage also wonderfully conveys Herbin's process of incorporating the brighter Fauvist colours into the palette of the much darker Cubist browns and greys; the trees and bushes are highlighted with blues and lilacs, while small dashes of orange in the canopies draw on the Corsican landscapes of 1907. When summarising the work, it is no wonder that very shortly after the present work's creation Herbin began to exhibit globally and was followed by major collectors of the time, eventually signing a contract with the hugely influential Léonce Rosenberg in 1917. From his humble beginnings in Northern France, Auguste Herbin relentlessly sought inspiration for and never tired of his artistic endeavour; it was an intrinsic element of his character that would 'differentiate [him], very distinctly, from all the other painters of his era and throughout his life' (A. Jakovsky, ibid., Paris, 1933, p. 8).