Le massif du Canigou 1923

Auguste Herbin created this watercolor painting titled 'Le massif du Canigou,' where the interplay of color and form immediately strikes the eye. The landscape is organized into distinct bands—the mountains, the trees, the fields—each rendered with a different application of watercolor. Herbin's approach here seems to destabilize traditional landscape painting. The perspective is flattened, and the composition is built from patches of color, moving toward abstraction. We can see the influence of Cubism, a style he was exploring at the time, in how he breaks down the scene into simplified, geometric shapes, and yet, this is distinctly Herbin's own visual language. The materiality of watercolor, its fluidity and translucency, is pushed to its limit. The landscape is not merely depicted but constructed through the materiality of paint. It encourages us to question what we consider as ‘real’ and to engage with the artwork not just as a representation of a scene, but as a discourse on how we perceive and understand the world around us.