The initial influence of
Impressionism and
Post-Impressionism visible in
paintings that he sent to the
Salon des Indépendants in 1906 gradually gave way to an involvement with
Fauvism, and he exhibited at the
Salon d'Automne in 1907. He started to experiment with
Cubism after his move in 1909 to the
Bateau-Lavoir studios, where he met
Pablo Picasso,
Georges Braque,
Otto Freundlich and
Juan Gris; he was also encouraged by his friendship with the art collector and critic
Wilhelm Uhde. His work was exhibited in the same room as that of
Jean Metzinger,
Albert Gleizes, and
Fernand Léger in the
Salon des Indépendants of 1910. In 1914, at the outbreak of
World War I, he was exempted from military service because of his short stature and was committed to work in an airplane factory near Paris. After producing his first abstract paintings in 1917, Herbin came to the attention of
Léonce Rosenberg who, after World War I, made him part of the group centred on his ''
Galerie de l'Effort Moderne'' and exhibited his work there on several occasions in March 1918 and 1921. Herbin's radical reliefs of simple geometric forms in painted wood, such as
Colored Wood Relief (1921; Paris,
Musée National d'Art Moderne), challenged not only the status of the
easel painting but also traditional figure–ground relationships. The incomprehension that greeted these reliefs and related furniture designs, even from those critics most favorably disposed towards
Cubism, was such that until 1926 or 1927, he followed Rosenberg's advice to return 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, such as
Bowls Players (1923; Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne), in which the objects were depicted as schematized volumes. Under the influence of
surrealism, he became increasingly critical of the rational forms employed by
De Stijl. After 1927, Herbin became interested in
microphotographs of crystals and plants and completely abandoned
figurative painting. In the 1930s, he co-founded the group
Abstraction-Création in Paris and served as publisher and author for the journal
Abstraction-Création. Art non figurativ. 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 Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, 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 Réalités Nouvelles, a successor of Abstraction-Création. He later served as the group's vice-president. ==Late life and death==