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Auguste Herbin
Oiseau, 1946
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The picture Oiseau, or Bird, by Auguste Herbin is typical of the late work of this French painter. Within its light grey inner frame the painting is divided into four clearly demarcated zones. A horizontal rectangle serves as a base, above which three vertically oriented sections of the painting stand next to each other. Each quarter of the painting is clearly structured and contains triangles, circles, semi-circles and squares in a few clear colors. These elements rarely overlap. Their composition hardly implies any spatial feeling – instead the shapes remain strongly bound to the surface. In their simple geometrical reduction, these pictorial elements appear to be signs – even signals. It is hard not to be reminded of alphabetic signal flags – and this intuitive reaction puts us on the right path. Auguste Herbin’s attempt to systematize his geometrical art led him to create what he called his Alphabet Plastique in 1942. This system of code assigns each letter of the alphabet to particular colors, geometrical forms and musical notes. Multiple assignments are possible, for example, the letter A stands not only for the color pink, but for seven tones in the scale.
The word „Oiseau“ has the amusing property of containing all the vowels and a single S – and as is usual in Herbin’s paintings, they can all be found in the picture: The green triangle is the O, the orange triangle is the I, the bluish-dark green triangle and the semi-circle of the same color stand for the S, the red circle for the E and all the pink shapes for the A.
But we also see that the picture is not exhausted once it has been used to spell the components of the word. Using these elements, Herbin has built a luminously clear, almost resonant, abstract composition.
Turning to the painting hanging directly next to it, we can see many similarities – despite the basic difference between the small water-color study and the large-format oil painting. The correspondences even include individual pictorial elements: the red circle the acute triangles, and above all the additive construction of the picture out of a canon of a few basic geometrical shapes. But, of course, there are differences that cannot be overlooked: the more muted coloration and the greater dynamics, as well as the three-dimensionality suggested by the superimposition in selected parts of the painting.
This work is called ‘Turin’ and was painted by Geneviève Claisse, who in 1959 became Auguste Herbin’s pupil and assistant. The elderly master is said to have remarked:
But even here we can guess how the young painter, who was heavily under the influence of her teacher, would strike out on her own path. She already rejected the set of regulations embodied in Herbin’s Alphabet Plastique as an overly confining corset – and she never used it in her own work.
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