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LENNIE BENNETTAuguste Herbin's art tries to do it all: It challenges eye, ear, mind and spirit, but also can be enjoyed emotionally, minus its intellectual subtext.
TARPON SPRINGS - You can't eat passion or conviction, especially as the passing years gnaw away at both. Fortunate, perhaps, are those artists who die young - Modigliani and Apollinaire come to mind - having blazed across the horizon in brilliant bursts of creativity that never had to be readdressed, compromised or forced to mature.
So Auguste Herbin, an artist who is often relegated to the footnotes of modern art and whose work is on display at the Leepa-Rattner Museum, seems a special case for admiration and understanding.
Admiration is easy. He was a gifted young Frenchman who painted lovely Fauvist landscapes while studying at Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lille, then moved to Paris in 1909 and worked in the same studios in which Picasso and Braque were making forays into a style we now know as cubism. Cubism appealed to Herbin's analytical side.
This exhibition, loaned from the collection of Anne Lahumiere, who owns the Galerie Lahumiere in Paris as well as a trove of Herbins, begins at this phase. Personnage Cubist Avril (Cubist Figure April), a gouache on paper from 1918, shows the principles of collaging, of layering and sandwiching forms to suggest a representational as well as formal truth.
After several years of painting in the cubist style, Herbin moved into a more pure abstraction. Works such as Composition and Composition sur Fond Blanc (Composition on White Background) from the later 1920s into the 1930s seem experimental in their efforts to integrate disparate shapes and odd color combinations that seem to fight for supremacy on the canvases and to fight against representation.
Understanding is the hard part. Herbin died in 1960 at age 78 and for the last 40 or so years of his life he painted in an abstract style that used a technique he named the "Alphabet Plastique." In it he assigned a letter to a color, as well as musical notes. Geometric forms also became part of the vocabulary. So dark red always represents the letter D and the note Do and always appears as a circle. Reddish orange is F and either Do or Re, a circle or a triangle.
In encrypting his colorful, shapely paintings, Herbin was having things both ways: art that appealed superficially as arrangements of shapes and color on a canvas but was infused with didactic meaning for those who cared to decode it.
He gave us clues, naming the works so we know what to look for and providing visual hints that sometimes verge on the representational. Rouge (Red) uses only those colors that spell out the word: light blue (R), Green (O), blue (U), dark orange (G) and, of course, red (E). You don't have to know that to appreciate the drama and sophistication of its formal elements - circles and triangles floating on a black background and perched on a central stack of curves and angles. If you stretch the point, you can see a face in it, with a smile waiting to be enlivened by the dots of red from an imagined makeup pot. And don't forget you can, if you know your scale, "sing" this painting, too.
The mental gymnastics needed to create such an inventive, interdependent aesthetic system is impressive. In accompanying studies, we see how Herbin moved shapes, as yet uncolored, around on paper like chess pieces. The compositions seem to become sparer as he grew older, and the colors more stark, as if at some point they would limn into pure cerebration and Herbin would paint himself into a corner, so to speak, as Mondrian did. It was the didactic that kept Herbin in forward motion, the exploration of visual values conveying a literal and spiritual message.
Today, we see that as nothing new or startling, and this business of giving colors musical notes and letters seems a little gimmicky. For Herbin, they were a way to make abstraction matter, a godlike impulse to order that part of the universe he could control, that which was within the boundaries of a canvas.
You can see why abstract expressionists would have loathed his work and young artists moving into pop and op art loved it, appropriating the formal elements and discarding Herbin's notion that colors have a spirituality.
He never deviated from his own beliefs about art and, predictably, barely scraped by financially. His biographer wrote of him, "there was no self-indulgence permitted, no deliberate repetition, no nod to critics, patrons, institution, nor even, the market."
Herbin was the kind of artist who never could have starved: He knew what he hungered for and how to feed it.
An accompanying exhibition, "Homage to Herbin," also from Lahumiere, features contemporary artists who have been inspired by Herbin and are often described, as Herbin is, as geometric-abstract artists. They, too, are an interesting and diverse group, obviously influenced by Herbin's principles of composition and color but not trying to copy it.
Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com
"Auguste Herbin: A Retrospective" and "Homage to Herbin" are at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, 600 Klosterman Road, on the Tarpon Springs campus of St. Petersburg College, through Oct. 24. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday with extended hours to 9 p.m. on Thursday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Adults $5, seniors $4, free for students and children and on Sunday. (727) 712-5762.