Auguste Herbin

In 1912 Herbin settled in Vadencourt, a small village in Oise valley, in the north of France.  There, he painted his famous series of the Bord de l'Oise landscapes which confirmed his inclination towards a geometric style.

Five year earlier, at a time when Herbin was exploring Divisionism and Fauvism, the artist discovered the work of Cézanne at his retrospective at the 1907 Paris Salon d'Automne.  In the wake of this exhibition, he shifted direction and began to treat nature with "the cylinder, the cone and the sphere," following Cézanne's call.

Le pont jaune à Céret, painted in 1913, is a magnificent example of Herbin's inventive and original approach to the Cubist landscape.  Between 1910 and 1913, when Cubism was mostly limited to a palette of black, browns, grays and whites, Herbin continued to use colors, following his Fauve years.  In the present work, the artist distills the local landscape into a coded language of triangles, circles and other geometric devices.  Herbin alternates different shades of green with pink, blues, reds and yellows.  Smooth monochromatic surfaces are juxtaposed with stippled and impastoed passages.  A few years after the present work was painted, Herbin was recognized as a pioneer of the synthetic form of Cubism which departed from the more fractured and highly analytical depiction of forms that characterized the movement's early years.