A vivid geometry of color and form, Auguste Herbin’s Venus I captures the spirit of post-war abstraction with unmistakable clarity. Painted in 1945 and signed by the artist, this work stands as a compelling example of Herbin’s mature period, where vibrant palettes, symbolic forms, and mathematical precision intertwine.

Artist

Born in 1882, Herbin was a pivotal figure in the development of geometric abstraction in 20th-century France. A co-founder of the Abstraction-Création group, he sought a universal visual language through color and form. In Venus I, Herbin arranges geometric symbols in a rigid grid of twelve squares. Each shape, circles, triangles, crescents, and petal-like forms, is executed in saturated tones of red, blue, green, yellow, and black, enclosed in a bold black frame. Central to the composition is a white anthropomorphic figure, echoed in the pink and black radial pattern of the lower torso, perhaps a stylised embodiment of Venus herself.

The logic of this composition is informed by Herbin’s “plastic alphabet,” a visual grammar he developed in the 1940s to associate letters, colours, and forms in a system of abstract communication. This painting likely reflects such an approach, although its exact symbolic decoding may remain elusive. Nevertheless, the result is visually dynamic and rhythmically coherent, reflecting Herbin’s lifelong dedication to harmony, proportion, and the autonomous power of colour.

A significant work by a key voice in abstract art, Venus I exemplifies Herbin’s ideal of a painting as both language and image.