Auguste Herbin, French painter and art theorist, was distinguished by his daring use of shapes and colors, drawing inspiration from the great Fauve and Cubist revolutions of the 20th century.^E century. An active member of the emergence of abstraction in France, he is also one of the protagonists of the Abstraction-Creation and New Reality movements.

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Initially influenced by Post-Impressionism, Herbin gradually drew closer to Cubist figures such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. In 1917, however, Herbin created his first abstract works and convinced that “art can only be monumental”, turned to the creation of geometric relief paintings on wood, thus contributing to questioning the traditional status of easel painting.

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In 1931, the artist co-founded the Abstraction-Création group, which was soon joined by Hans Arp, Albert Gleizes, and František Kupka. Herbin then engaged in a creation composed of simple, sometimes undulating shapes, using flat areas of pure colors. In 1946, he continued his research on color by inventing his own plastic alphabet, where each of the twenty-six colors corresponds to a letter, a geometric shape and a sound.

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In 2013, the Matisse Museum in Le Cateau-Cambrésis and the Museum of Modern Art in Céret dedicated a retrospective, highlighting his artistic career and his influence in the field of abstraction.