Joie II

Even during his earliest involvement with Cubism before the First World War, Auguste Herbin’s compositions tended to deploy flattened geometric forms and pure, unmodeled colour. As his style evolved through different phases over the ensuing decades, this distillation of form remained central to his artistic vision. By 1940, influenced by the esoteric philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, the colour theories of Wolfgang von Goethe and the medieval art of alchemy, Herbin had formulated his own synthesis of philosophy, music, language, colour and form, which he codified in his 1949 publication L’art non-figuratif non-objectif. His intent was to ‘escape from the object and to find again the word and creative action’ (quoted in D. René, Herbin, The Plastic Alphabet, exh. cat., Galerie Denise René, New York, 1973, n.p.). Executed with an extreme precision and sense of internal balance, Joie II is a bold, chromatic example of the artist’s mature style, laid out according to the principles of his L’alphabet plastique, in which each letter of the title corresponds to a colour and form, or combination of forms, generating an intense, vitalistic force and internal energy.