*VR Preview on www.TranscendAuctions.com - Abstract gull - Attributes: Signed on lower right. After Auguste Herbin - Media: Oil on canvas framed - Dimensions metric: 30 by 40 cm (53 by 63 cm framed) - Dimensions imperial: 11 3/4 by 15 3/4 inches (21 by 25 inches framed) - Artist biography: Auguste Herbin was a French painter of modern art best known for his Cubist and abstract paintings consisting of colourful geometric figures. He co-founded the groups Abstraction-Creation and Salon des Realites Nouvelles which promoted non-figurative abstract art. Auguste was born in Quievy,Nord, studied at ecole des Beaux-Arts de Lille, then settled in Paris. The initial influence of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism gradually gave way to an involvement with Fauvism. He started to experiment with Cubism where he met Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Otto Freundlich and Juan Gris. His work was exhibited in the Salon des Independants and the influential Section d'Or exhibition.After his first abstracts in 1917 he joined the group centred on his Galerie de l'Effort Moderne. Herbin's radical reliefs of simple geometric forms in painted wood, such as Coloured Wood Relief, challenged not only the status of the easel painting but also traditional figure-ground relationships. 1927 he returned to a representational style and produced paintings in the New Objectivity style.Herbin himself later disowned his landscapes, still lifes and genre scenes of this period Under the influence of surrealism,. After 1927 Herbin becomes interested by microphotographs of crystals and plants and completely abandons figurative painting.In the 1930s, he co-founded the group Abstraction-Creation in Paris. In the second issue of the journal he wrote against the rising Fascism and oppression of all kinds. As a member of the Communist Association des ecrivains et Artistes Revolutionnaires he signed a statement against the political indifference of artists. Critical of Stalinism, he left the Communist party in the 1940s.Beginning in 1942, Herbin developed a language of form and color, his ""alphabet plastique"". Increasingly, his paintings consist only of colorful arrangements of triangles, circles and rectangles. In 1946 he was one of the founders of the Salon des Realites Nouvelles, a successor of Abstraction-CreationDuring the 2000s an important series of original Herbin's signed rugs exhibited in France, Moscow, London and New York played a key role in the worldwide rediscovery of Auguste Herbin's creations.Public collections:• Museum de Fundatie, The Netherlands• National Galleries of Scotland• Matisse Museum, France• Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Denmark• Museum of Modern Art, France