Auguste HERBIN

Auguste Herbin – Biography, the ‘Alphabet Plastique’ and Original Screenprints

Auguste Herbin (born in Quiévy, northern France, on 29 April 1882; died in Paris on 31 January 1960) is one of the founding figures of geometric abstraction in France. A Fauve and then a Cubist at the Bateau-Lavoir, he co-founded the Abstraction-Création group in 1931 and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in 1946. In 1942 he devised his ‘alphabet plastique’, a system that gives every letter its own colour, shape and musical note. His flat, saturated discs, triangles and rectangles shaped post-war constructive art, and today collectors most often meet them in his screenprints.

Le Coin des Arts currently offers two screenprints dated 1959: ‘Minuit’, a plate from the twelve-print album issued in an edition of 150, and ‘Nouveau Midi’. Each has been chosen for the evenness of its colour, its numbering, provenance and condition, and each catalogue entry states exactly what appears on the sheet – an important distinction with Herbin, as explained below.

Early Years: Le Cateau, Lille and Paris

Herbin grew up in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, where he first learnt to draw, before studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lille. In 1901 he settled in Paris. His first canvases were Impressionist in manner, and some were sold through the dealer Clovis Sagot. In 1904 he met the German critic and collector Wilhelm Uhde, an early supporter. After showing at the Salon des Indépendants, he exhibited brightly coloured, Fauve-inflected pictures at the Salon d’Automne in 1907.

The Bateau-Lavoir and the Road to Abstraction

In 1909 Herbin took a studio at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, where he got to know Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Otto Freundlich. His work turned Cubist, and in 1910 he showed at the Indépendants alongside Metzinger, Gleizes and Fernand Léger. A stay at Céret in the Pyrenees in 1913 produced landscapes already close to pure geometry. Exempted from military service in the First World War, he was assigned to an aircraft factory near Paris. Around 1917 he painted his first abstract works and joined Léonce Rosenberg, whose Galerie de l’Effort Moderne exhibited him in 1918 and 1921; his painted wooden reliefs of the period were radical for their time (one is in the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris). On Rosenberg’s advice he went back to figurative painting from about 1922 to 1926, a phase he later disowned.

Abstraction-Création and the ‘Alphabet Plastique’

From 1927 Herbin abandoned figuration for good. In 1931 he and the Belgian artist Georges Vantongerloo launched Abstraction-Création, the Paris-based association that gathered non-figurative artists from across Europe and published a journal to which he contributed as editor and author. For a time a member of the Communist Party, he later broke with it over Stalinism. The decisive step came in 1942 with the alphabet plastique: each letter is matched to a colour, to one or more elementary forms and to a note. A word – ‘Vie’, ‘Midi’, ‘Minuit’, ‘Vendredi’ – thus becomes the programme of a picture, and the title is its key.

Réalités Nouvelles, Denise René and the Final Decade

In 1946 Herbin helped to found the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, serving as vice-president until 1955 and exhibiting there regularly until his death. He was represented by the Galerie Denise René, the Paris stronghold of geometric and kinetic art, also home to Victor Vasarely. In 1949 he published his treatise L’Art non figuratif non objectif (Lydia Conti), illustrated with colour screenprints. Paralysed down his right side in 1953, he taught himself to paint with his left hand. He was selected for documenta in Kassel in 1955 and 1959. His great-niece Geneviève Claisse, whom he encouraged to paint, carried geometric abstraction forward and later compiled his catalogue raisonné.

Herbin in British Collections

The Tate holds a late gouache, Nude (1960), a work whose title belongs to the same vocabulary as the 1959 screenprints. The National Galleries of Scotland are also listed among the public collections owning his work. In France the largest group is at the Musée Matisse in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, his childhood town, with further holdings at the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Céret, Grenoble, Lille and Tourcoing. Recent exhibitions have revived interest well beyond France: ‘Auguste Herbin, le maître révélé’ at the Musée de Montmartre (15 March–15 September 2024), with a bilingual French-English catalogue, followed by a show at the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 2025.

The Printed Work: Screenprints, Editions and References

Herbin’s printed œuvre is known above all through screenprints, a technique whose flat, opaque layers suit his pure colour perfectly. The earliest illustrate L’Art non figuratif non objectif (1949). In 1959 Galerie Denise René issued an album of twelve screenprints in an edition of 150: Minuit, Vin, Midi, Été, Nue, Nu, Vitalité, Fin, Destin, Vendredi, Clarté and Herbin, each based on one of his painted compositions. After 1960 many posthumous screenprints were produced after his paintings, typically bearing a studio stamp and a publisher’s blindstamp rather than a signature.

There is, to our knowledge, no standard catalogue raisonné of the prints. The reference work is Geneviève Claisse’s catalogue of the paintings (Lausanne, 1993), so a screenprint is best described by title, date, publisher and numbering, plus where relevant the Claisse number of the source painting (e.g. ‘after Claisse 945’). See our page on printing and editions and what makes an original print.

Collecting Herbin Prints: a Buyer’s Guide

Edition and numbering. A sheet from the 1959 album should carry its title, the date ‘1959’ and a number out of 150. Posthumous editions carry later dates and often no stated edition size.

Signature. This is the crucial point. Herbin inscribed title, name and date on his canvases, and these inscriptions can be reproduced within the printed image. Tell apart a genuine handwritten signature in ink or pencil from a printed inscription, a studio stamp or a blindstamp. No impression made after January 1960 can bear his own hand.

Colour and condition. The appeal of a Herbin screenprint lies in perfectly even colour fields: look for unfaded colours, no scratches or creases in the ink layer, and full margins.

Pitfalls. Exhibition posters, small unsigned screenprints tipped into Denise René catalogues and offset reproductions are not signed original prints. Our guarantees are set out on our authenticity page, and we offer bespoke framing.

Le Coin des Arts selects prints by the leading names of geometric abstraction, including Victor Vasarely, Geneviève Claisse, Jean Gorin, Max Bill and Robert Delaunay. Explore also modern art and our engravings and lithographs.

Sources and further reading

Geneviève Claisse, Herbin, catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint, Lausanne, Éditions du Grand-Pont, 1993 · Auguste Herbin, L’Art non figuratif non objectif, Paris, Lydia Conti, 1949 · Auguste Herbin, le maître révélé 1882–1960, Madrid and Paris, El Viso, 2024 · Tate – Auguste Herbin, Nude · Musée de Montmartre – Auguste Herbin · Lenbachhaus – Auguste Herbin · Buffalo AKG Art Museum – Minuit (1959) · Larousse – Auguste Herbin