This year at our stand we will be highlighting the Plastic Alphabet period of Auguste Herbin (1882-1960), which began around 1942. This was the last and most iconic period of his career; Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) wrote a poem about it, and Auguste Herbin painted it. Two years separate him from André Derain (1880-1954). At the end of his career, unlike Derain, Auguste Herbin continued to innovate, opening up a field of exploration for a whole generation of artists, such as Olle Baertling (1911-1981), Jo Delahaut (1911-1992), Jean Dewasne (1921-1999), Günter Fruhtrunk (1921-1982), and Victor Vasarely (1906-1997). A number of artists gravitated around Herbin, including Geneviève Claisse (1935-2018), who was also the author of his catalogue raisonné.

In 1950, Paris was the essential hub for artists of geometric abstraction. The Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, directed by Auguste Herbin, was highly regarded for its rigor and its championing of this art form. Herbin had written "L'Art non figuratif non objectif" (Non-Figurative, Non-Objective Art), published in 1949 by Lydia Conti. In it, he shared his thoughts on art, placing humankind at the center of nature; explaining that colors originate from nature, that universal forms are geometric shapes, understandable by all, and that the artist is a free creator if they consent to create without ulterior motives, without calculation, and thus, through their works, they offer themselves entirely to the community: his visual alphabet was born. An innovative, autonomous, and original language that opened new paths for painting. Auguste Herbin's work will be the subject of a retrospective in March 2024 at a Parisian institution.
The works, drawn exclusively from our collection amassed over nearly 40 years, have mostly been loaned to solo and museum exhibitions. For a number of them, we will be presenting the preparatory drawing, the gouache, and the final canvas.
This presentation will be complemented by works from artists who were part of his circle, such as Geneviève Claisse and Olle Baertling.

Let's not forget our contemporaries who continue to keep this trend alive, especially in Switzerland. Our faithful artist Hans-Jörg Glattfelder will be there, accompanied by a grande dame of abstract painting, Ode Bertrand. Hans-Jörg Glattfelder will be awarded the Aurélie Nemours Prize in September in Paris. This prize recognizes any artist, regardless of their discipline, whose work pursues a rigorous artistic quest. Glattfelder's research into the non-Euclidean plane since the 1970s has led him to produce works whose visual impact makes us question our ability to see. He unbalances us with angular forms that are neither quite rhombuses nor quite rectangles; he plays with our vanishing points on the plane.

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