Lot 9 D

During the first decades of his career, Auguste Herbin spent time in various places around northern and southern France, creating village scenes, landscapes and still lifes. These frequent relocations repeatedly provided him with new thematic stimuli that challenged his visual habits and presented him with different compositional possibilities. The relocations, which additionally led him to Alfred Lichtwark in Hamburg in 1909, were usually also accompanied by stylistic changes” (Auguste Herbin, exh. cat. Lenbachhaus München 2025, p. 9).
In 1909 Herbin was spending the summer in Le Cateau-Cambrésis in the Département Haute-de-France: he selected the most notable sight of the area, the striking Saint-Benin railway viaduct, as the motif for the painting here. The viaduct, waterfall and vegetation are built up out of parallel brushstrokes, a technique still rooted in the tradition of late impressionism. But this stylistic phase was already undergoing a transition in 1909: while the motifs on the right – the viaduct, weir and waterfall – still remain recognisable, the colours on the left develop a semi-abstract life of their own tending in the direction of cubism. This partly representational and partly abstract pictorial structure is characteristic of Herbin’s works from the years 1908 and 1909. The dynamically charged composition and the selected palette consisting of warm tones of brown with green and yellow are precisely what define the work’s charm.