Lot 311 D

“Nature morte à la cafetière” is one of Herbin's early Cubist still lifes. He was working in the Bateau Lavoir at that time, in direct proximity to Pablo Picasso, on Montmartre. With Picasso, Braque, Léger, Kupka, Brancusi, Archipenko or Metzinger and Gleizes, Auguste Herbin was among the avant-garde of abstraction in France in the early 20th century. In contrast to the muted monochrome tonalities of classical Cubism, with its three-dimensional, ambiguously oscillating fragmentation of representational forms, Herbin inventively developed his own distinctive variety of abstraction which - as emphasised by Geneviève Claisse - was characterised from the very beginning by its vivid chromatic qualities, colour contrasts and two-dimensional geometry (Geneviève Claisse, Herbin, Paris 1993, p. 49). His idiosyncratic painting would prepare the way for the style described by the term “synthetic” Cubism.
In the present composition, the motif has essentially been reduced formally to two-dimensional components on the picture plane. These include the interior details within the contours, such as the light and the “reflective” effects on the depicted objects, which have congealed into abstract bars and geometricised surface decoration. They are thus inscribed into the arrangement of the picture plane and adapted to the new, painted pictorial structure. The slight impasto and chromatically graduated tones within the objects' contours generate a vibrant impression through their delineation in black and in combination with the dynamism of diagonal, sharply angled elements. Here the focus is on the metallic-looking silhouette of a coffee can in warm tones, whose curvilinear handle has inscribed itself into an amazingly puristic, vertical, blue rectangle as a semi-abstract form.

For this lot, special conditions are applicable (legend "D" according to the conditions of sale).