Auguste Herbin

Paris. It is hard to believe, but cursed artists, as was true in the days of Van Gogh, still exist in a society where communication is universal and the revolution in modern art appears to be accepted. Auguste Herbin, who died in his apartment on the Boulevard Pasteur at the end of January at the age of almost eighty, was able to make a living from his painting only during his last years. Thanks to Denise René, the enthusiastic supporter of abstract, geometric art, who regularly showed his work in her gallery, he finally gained his first real commission--when he was sixty-five years old.

He was born in 1882 in Quiévy, in Nord. After a period in the Art Institute of Lille, he lived in the Bateau-Lavoir, when Picasso and Gris were there, and participated in the Cubist adventure. But it was much later, during and immediately after the Second World War, that he was able to be entirely original. In the area of geometric abstraction, he is equal to a Malevich or a Mondrian.

During the last twenty years, Herbin painted words: Friday, Sanctity, Steel . . . Each corresponds to the arrangement of a simple geometric shape: triangle, rectangle, circle, or square, and a color. It is the conclusion of a long process of reflection according to which it was necessary above all to separate painting from the object in order to arrive at an autonomous pictorial expression.

He summarized his ideas in an astonishing book, Nonobjective, Nonfigurative Art, published in 1949: "When the sap no longer rises, blue is absent, it stays yellow, that is fall. When in the dark, life leaves the grain. It manifests itself as white, the opposite of black." And, "In the plant, the transformation of energy occurs under certain conditions; in man, the transformation of the same energies is produced under opposite conditions." On the subject of his plastic alphabet: "B: reddish purple; a combination of spherical and rectangular shapes; sonority do, si. R: light blue: a combination of hemispheres and triangles; sonority so, fa, mi." Rimbaud is not far away.

Herbin frequently retreated to the Goetheanum in Dornach, in the canton of Basel, in Switzerland. A disciple of Rudolf Steiner, he had a theosophic conception of the world and tried to express a spiritual vision of the universe by means of the geometrical order in his works.

Herbin was also a painter by temperament. To a critic who asked, not without skepticism, according to what rule were isosceles triangles usually yellow in his paintings, the artist replied, "It is obvious that yellow is sharp-pointed."