Lot 3 D

The French painter Auguste Herbin, like Wassily Kandinsky for example, experimented with different styles and progressed from a late-impressionist manner of painting to fauvism and cubism and, from there, to a geometrically defined abstraction. For Herbin the most important stage in the path of his oeuvre was his exploration of cubism from 1908 to 1912. Here his visit to the major Paul Cézanne exhibition at the Salon d’Automne in 1907 was crucial: he was particularly inspired by the landscapes there. When Pablo Picasso created the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” that same year and Herbin moved into the “Bateau-Lavoir” on Montmartre in 1909 – in immediate proximity to Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris – he definitively turned to cubism, taking up its pursuit of the fragmentation of form and its two-dimensionality.
In our landscape, “Le Pont” from 1910, the cubist decomposition of form is primarily noticeable in the trees and on the surface of the water. The motif of the bridge is reminiscent of Braque: in Herbin’s work it not only links the two shores with one another, it also unites the different stylistic directions of a waning fauvism and cubism. However, in contrast to Picasso and Braque, Herbin forgoes the reserved, mostly grey and brown palette of his friends and fellow painters, continuing to select intense colours for his landscapes with green, yellow and blue. Unlike the two-dimensional compactness of the trees at the front, the architecture of the bridge unfolds within individual strokes, lines and dabs, transforming the motif into a stimulating visual experience.