Auguste Herbin (1882–1960) was a leading figure in the development of geometric abstraction in Europe. Beginning his career as a Fauve, he exhibited alongside Matisse and Derain at the Salon des Indépendants in 1906. After moving to the Bateau-Lavoir in 1909, he encountered Picasso, Braque, and Gris, Herbin quickly embraced Cubism; by the following year, his colorful geometric compositions were shown with works by Léger, Gleizes, and Metzinger. His growing reputation led to a solo exhibition organized by the prominent dealer Léonce Rosenberg at the Galerie l’Effort Moderne in 1918. Herbin’s commitment to abstraction ultimately culminated in the founding of the Abstraction-Création group with the De Stijl artist Georges Vantongerloo in 1931 and later in the publication of L’art non-figuratif non-objectif (1949), which introduced his “Plastic Alphabet,” a system linking geometric shapes, colors, letters, and musical notes. This universal language animates the vibrant oil paintings and gouaches of Herbin’s mature period (c. 1945-1960), in which hard-edged triangles, rectangles and circles of pure, unmodulated color are distributed in registers that organize the picture field.  Pictorial structure and vivid color become inseparable. Herbin influenced a wide range of artists and sculptors working in geometric abstract idioms from the 1940s through 1970. Artists as diverse as Victor Vasarely and Jean Tinguely have claimed Herbin’s works as inspirations for their own, and recent investigations into post-war European geometric abstraction show renewed interest in Auguste Herbin’s role.