Jean Hélion

Jean Hélion (1904-1987), an early and cosmopolitan activist for the abstract cause, returned to a figurative practice at the precise moment when the fruits of social and commercial recognition were offered to him. Abstraction carried hopes of reform that extended well beyond the aesthetic domain. It had become the vector of political projects, the standard of modern values. An ideal that, for Hélion, crumbled almost as soon as he made it his own. In 1931, his trip to the USSR made him foresee the divorce between the most innovative art and a society that proclaimed itself revolutionary. Back in France, he discovered an abstract avant-garde that he judged too quick to turn into a chapel, too impatient to erect its values ​​into dogmas. The metaphor is necessary as the evolution of his painting was inspired by the biological model, in the mid-1940s, in the United States where he had just spent nearly a decade, Hélion dismayed his American admirers by exhibiting his recent figurative research. Abstraction, partly thanks to his action, had taken root in New York. Hélion made, in these pre-war years, an important contribution to the international recognition of modern art. His studio in Paris, then in the United States where he lived from the mid-1930s, was a place of exchange. Hélion was an essential relay for the penetration of theories of abstraction towards Great Britain and the United States (and respectively his role in the creation of the magazine Axis or the founding of the AAA, American Abstract Artists).