Jean Hélion

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Jean Hélion (April 21, 1904 – October 27, 1987) was a French modernist painter.

His birthplace was Couterne in Normandy. After brief study of chemistry in 1920 at l'Institut Industriel du Nord in Lille, he went to Paris in 1921 to be an architectural apprentice. Hélion's interest in painting grew from the many hours he spent in the Louvre, where he particularly admired the work of Poussin and Philippe de Champaigne. His first paintings date from 1922-1923, and in 1925 he abandoned his architectural studies.

Hélion exhibited for the first time in 1928 at the Salon des Indépendants. His works of the late 1920s, mostly still lifes in a painterly style of simplified color and bold outlines, gave way by 1930 to a vocabulary of abstract geometric form that derived from the Neoplasticists Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. During the following years Hélion's art was to evolve under the influence of Purism, and he became recognized as a leading figure of modernism. He was also a critic and theoretician, publishing important writings during the 1930s.

In 1936 Hélion moved to the United States. His painting was soon to undergo a radical change which would confound his admirers, as he abandoned abstraction decisively in 1939. With The Cyclist, his first figurative canvas, he revealed a simplified and streamlined treatment of form that is related to Léger's style of the 1930s.

In response to the emergency of World War II, Hélion returned to France and joined the armed forces. Taken prisoner in June of 1940, he was held until 1942, when he managed to escape.

Hélion resumed work in 1943 with a series of depersonalized images of men in hats. Deliberative as always, he painted many close variations on favorite themes, including women at open windows and men reading newspapers. In the following years he developed the cartoon-like aspect of the style he had embraced, producing in 1949 a series of awkward, bony female nudes which have few parallels in the history of art.

In 1951 came another of the abrupt changes that mark his career, as Hélion adapted a naturalistic style. For the next several years he concentrated mostly on figures and still lifes, depicted in a studio setting.

In the 1960s his manner reverted to something closer to his style of the 1940s, but with a new breadth, and he abandoned oils for acrylic. During the next two decades he would paint several large triptychs. His subject matter revealed, as it always had, a preoccupation with sometimes idiosyncratic themes: artists and models, sliced-open squashes, umbrellas, accidental falls, street scenes and street repair.

In the last years of his life his eyesight failed and his last painting was completed in 1983, four years before his death.

Hélion was married several times; one of his wives was the daughter of Peggy Guggenheim.

[edit] Legacy

While Hélion's abstract paintings of the 1930s have always been well-regarded, his subsequent stylistic changes took him far from the modern mainstream, and were regarded in some quarters as apostasy (Licht, 1986, p. 9), although in recent years there has been a reevaluation. Artists who have acknowledged the influence of Hélion include Roy Lichtenstein and Leland Bell.

Hélion's work is in many French museums, as well as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Kunsthalle, Hamburg, and the Tate Gallery, London.

Most of the artist's notebooks are preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

[edit] References

• Cousseau, Henry-Claude (1992). Helion. Paris: Editions du Regard. ISBN 2-903370-76-1 (French language)
• Licht, Fred, edited by (1986). Homage to Jean Hélion: Recent Works. Venice: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.