Museum of Geometric and MADI Art

Auguste Herbin: A Retrospective and A Homage to Herbin

Press Release

MADI MUSEUM AND GALLERY
ANNOUNCES NOVEMBER EVENT

The MADI Museum and Gallery announces Auguste Herbin: A Retrospective and A Homage to Herbin:  A Selection of Contemporary Geometric Artists.  Opening Friday, November 19 the collection will be comprised of a 20-piece retrospective of Auguste Herbin and 26 works by six other geometric artists.  Herbin was born in northeastern France in 1882 and exhibited with the Cubists such as Picasso and Braque. Feeling Cubism had too many limitations, he broke away to pursue pure abstractions by applying his interests in geometry, color and the dynamics of rhythmic form.  Herbin became the leading French abstract, geometric artist and an inspirational figure to abstract artists in both Europe and the Americas, including the MADI Movement.  Along with Vasily Kandinsky, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Joseph Albers, Piet Mondrian and Victor Vasarely, his influence advanced geometric abstraction, hard-edge abstraction and Op Art way past his death in 1960.   This event is funded in part by the City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs.  

The MADI (mah-DEE) art movement, launched by Arden Quin in Buenos Aires in 1946, was one of several modernist successful attempts to climb out of the turmoil of post World War II Europe and the Americas.  The works are considered by both artists and collectors to be playful, whimsical, colorful and breaching the square and rectangular boundaries which had restrained traditional art.  Often they are, or seem to be, more sculptural using materials and negative space to make their statements.  These abstract works are not representative or symbolic but focus on the geometric object itself, the shapes, texture, dimension and usually, vivid colors.  MADI works relate to other artists including Alexander Calder and Naum Gabo in their color, mobility, dimension and playfulness; they relate to Mondrian and Malevich as they are unbounded and geometric.
Carmelo Arden Quin took the MADI movement to Paris in the late 1940’s permanently rooting MADI in Europe.  Growing into other disciplines, MADI today includes over 75 sculptors, painters, architects, musicians and poets.  

MADI’s history in Dallas goes back 10 years when Dallas collectors Bill and Dorothy Masterson purchased works from Volf Roitman, after which they began to collect MADI passionately.  When Bill’s law firm purchased an Uptown office building in 2002, they commissioned Roitman to design the façade; a colorful and varied landscape plan closely followed.  Today the exterior of the building is a geometric joy suggesting the contents of the inside – the museum where much of the Mastersons’s collection is on exhibit and a gallery where MADI artists are represented.