Auguste Herbin

Galerie Clovis Sagot, Paris

Ceret, Musée d'art moderne; Cateau-Cambresis, Musée Matisse, Herbin, 1994-95
Stadtsgalerie Klagenfurt, A. Herbin, von Impresionismus bis Konstrucktivimus, 1998
Hong Kong Museum of Art, Masterpieces, The Origins of Modern Art in France, 1880-1940, 1993
Deurne, Museum de Wieger; Spanbroek, Frisia Museum, Kubistisch avontuur, 2003, no. 6

Geneviève Claisse, Herbin, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, 1993, Lausanne, no. 148, illustrated p. 305

Good condition. Canvas is lined. Surface is clean. Under UV, a number of strokes of inpainting in upper right sky including blue outline and pink clouds beneath.
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It was between 1906 and 1907 that Herbin completely embraced Fauvism.  In March 1907 he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants alongside Derain, Vlaminck and Braque and in October of 1907, Herbin exhibited additional Fauve works at the fifth Salon d'Automne at the Grand Palais.  At the invitation of Wilhelm Uhde, Herbin spent the spring of 1907 on the island of Corsica.  His use of vibrant colors and vigorous brushwork are typical of Herbin's Corsica series and inspired by the energetic Fauve scenes which the Fauves had been painting in Collioure, Saint Tropez, La Ciotat and L'Estaque.  Uhde, a German art collector, dealer, author and critic, would, soon after this trip to Corsica, organize his first one-man exhibition in Berlin.

During the years before the First World War Herbin won recognition in Germany and the influence of German painting at this time is evident in Étang et Petit Maison.  Herbin's work could also be seen  in the Sesession and the Brûcke, in the Galerie der Sturm, in the Sonderbund exposition in Cologne and in the Galerie Flechtheim in Frankfurt. His northern-French use of colors and flatness of the surface began to be closer to the works of painters like Schmidt-Rottluff, Pechstein, Heckel, than to his French fauve colleagues, with whom he exhibited in the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne. 

In the words of Serge Lemoine, director of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, speaking of the Herbin painting  l'Eglise à Orgerus, 1908 (fig 1), "this painting could well be directly linked to the works of certain painters of the Blau Reiter, in particular to Kandinsky (Grûngasse in Murnau, 1909, Stâdische Galerie), to Jawlensky (Einsamkeit, 1912, Dortmund, Museum am Ostwalt), to Gabrielle Mûnter (Landschaft mit weissen Mauer, 1910, Hagen, Karl-Ernst Osthaus Museum)" (G. Claisse, Herbin, foreword by Serge Lemoine, p. 11).

 

Fig. 1  Auguste Herbin, l'Eglise à Orgerus, 1908, oil on canvas, Galerie Neupert, Zurich

Fig. 2  Wassily Kandinsky, Marnu-Grungasse, 1909, Stâdische Galerie, Munich