Auguste Herbin – Jaune (1946)

Louisiana exhibition poster with the work, Jaune (1946), by the French artist, Auguste Herbin (1882-1960). Herbin is a constructivist and in the 1930s arrived at the style that became characteristic of his post-war pictures—such as here, Jaune. The starting point is Herb's own system, where simple geometric shapes and pure colors correspond to certain letters and tones.

In Louisiana, constructive art has a special place. The museum's collection of Constructivist art was significantly strengthened in 1986 with a generous donation from the American McCrory Collection. A gift that followed in the years after Louisiana exhibited McCrory's collection in 1978—the only known overview of Constructivist art at the time.

Constructivism has its roots in Russia, where the avant-garde wanted to renew the artistic idiom after the Russian Revolution. With their art, the constructivists joined the break that emerged politically and socially. The artist, like the engineer and the scientist, had to build a new and better world.

Constructivists built their paintings from geometric shapes, and thus hoped to create an art that could be understood by everyone, regardless of background. The expression had to be rational, objective and useful. Constructivists distance themselves from any depiction of the seen, the emotional and spontaneous, and instead create their own reality.

Parallel to the development of constructivism in Russia, the constructivist idiom was experimented with in Europe. The Dutch artist group de Stijl and the Bauhaus school in Germany found inspiration in the Russian Constructivists.