Paysage cubiste 1913

Auguste Herbin’s Paysage cubiste is a great example of painting exploring new ways of seeing, the way the painting becomes a kind of thinking. It’s all about process, isn't it? Check out how Herbin builds up this landscape with chunky strokes of greens and browns, sort of blocky and determined. You can almost feel the weight of the paint, see the direction each stroke takes. There’s this real push and pull between abstraction and representation, you know? Look how these greens give way to blues and browns, as the shapes lose their definition. And those brushstrokes! You can almost see him, standing there, wrestling with the canvas. There's this real physicality to it, like he's trying to build something solid out of pure color and texture. You know like the early work of Braque, or even Cezanne? Just really solid ways of building up landscape through thinking about the paint. It's about ambiguity and the joy of looking.