Madame Herbin competes and dialogues with two other women represented by Julio González and Pablo Gargallo: La Montserrat and Alice Prim, Kikí of Montparnasse, thus joining the compositional modernity of the early avant-gardes.
Auguste Herbin (Quiévy (France), 1882 – Paris, 1960)
Son of a family of textile workers, Auguste Herbin was born in Quiévy, a small town near Cateau Cambrésis, on April 29, 1882. Thanks to great family economic efforts, young Herbin was able to enter the Academy of Fine Arts of Lille in 1899, but his early and keen interest in the wake of impressionist painting led him into conflict with teachers and classmates.
In 1901 he settles in Paris. The initial influence of impressionism and post-impressionism gave way to his involvement in cubism. In 1909 he moves to the Bateau-Lavoir studios, where he meets Picasso, Gris and Braque and participates in the birth and early development of the cubist movement. Herbin's cubism very soon disarticulated the differences between analytical cubism and synthetic cubism, fostering variable formulas that oscillated between the geometric translation of motifs and the encounter between cubism and the abstract, an aspect in which Herbin was truly a pioneer. In 1916, while mobilized due to the war, he signs an exclusive contract with Léonce Rosemberg. In 1921 Herbin's cubist work was valued higher than that of Léger or Braque and, nevertheless, the artist, to overcome certain moments of impasse, decided to change direction in his work. Between 1922 and 1926 he produced one of the most original formulas of the new European realism. After this period, the artist resumed, around 1925 or 1926, abstraction and in 1931 he becomes one of the creators of the Abstraction-Création group. In the post-war period, young creators of Concrete Art claimed Herbin's influence and in this field, and bearing an unusual recognition, the painter would develop his work, even overcoming serious health problems, until his death in 1960, at the age of 78. Between 1911 and 1912, Auguste Herbin painted four portraits of Madame H… In them, he took as his model his then companion and later wife, Louise Bailleux. But despite the fact that a certain resemblance can be appreciated between them, the physiognomic differences confirm that the painter is treating the female portrait as a genre and not so much as the embodiment of a concrete personality.
The Portrait of Madame H. possesses the quality of being a synthesis of the diversity shown by the painter in his female portraits of these years. Herbin appears indifferent both to the identification between background and figure characteristic of so-called analytical cubism and to the random concurrence of colored planes characteristic of so-called synthetic cubism and, despite this, the work participates in both registers. By fostering a powerful gesturality of the represented model, which communicates eagerly with the viewer, Herbin homogenizes the relationship between background and figure through similar plastic treatment. The entire composition is governed by the same register that makes geometric form coexist with brushstrokes rich in chromaticism, traced with the same gesture of the brush and with similar intensity in all its applications. Through this procedure, Herbin does not geometricize a natural model, but rather through the conjunction of syncopated prismatic forms brings forth the female figure and all the elements that accompany it.
Herbin apparently maintained the traditional vision that reproduces the figure of a woman in an interior leaning on a table. Apparently because, in reality, the entire figurative motif appears constructed through the articulation of acute triangular forms and irregular parallelograms in which the intensity of color, in flat tints, plays a special role in the definition of space. The work, therefore, beyond its figurative evidence, possesses a clear abstract conception, appearing, overall, very close to what Gris also elaborated in 1912, especially through the construction of the canvas through the systematic articulation of diagonal planes that converge with other vertical and horizontal planes.
The painter thus anticipates another of the paths of cubist aesthetics, posed in some of the foundational theoretical texts of the movement, but in truth not realized in painting until the historical circumstances of modernity changed substantially. In two Portraits of Madame H. made in 1911 and 1912, Herbin clearly posed the way in which cubist aesthetics could lead to the achievement of a new classicism. Herbin deduces from the reduction into abstract planes of the figurative a new figurative architecture based on norm, concentration and densification of compositional structure. And color. An intense presence of color in the work, a characteristic that equally defines the represented figure.
