Jean Helion (19041987) is a fascinating artist from many points of view. An architectural draftsman soon converted to abstract painting, he became a leading member of the international Abstraction-Creation group in the early 1930's. After the death of his close friend Theo van Doesburg, he took abstraction to New York, where he lived on and off from 1932 to 1946, and to Britain, especially in the years 193337 when many avant-garde artists took refuge there.
Jean Helion (19041987) is a fascinating artist from many points of view. An architectural draftsman soon converted to abstract painting, he became a leading member of the international Abstraction-Creation group in the early 1930's. After the death of his close friend Theo van Doesburg, he took abstraction to New York, where he lived on and off from 1932 to 1946, and to Britain, especially in the years 193337 when many avant-garde artists took refuge there.
Jean Hélion (1904-1987) became a leading member of the international Abstraction-Creation group in the early 1930s. He then took abstraction to New York, where he advised the avant-garde collector A. E. Gallatin on purchases for his Gallery of Living Art, a crucial influence on the early phases of the developing New York School.
In France after World War II, however, he evolved a unique language of painting, employing people and objects that are both contructivist and naturalistic--his own language of signs populated by shopwindow dummies, newspaper readers, and startling nudes. In his return to figuration he may be compared to his close friends Balthus and Alberto Giacometti, even though his style is unique.
This book is the first in English on the artist for some thirty years. It accompanies a retrospective exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, commemorating the hundredth anniversary of his birth. It travels to the National Academy of Design, New York, in summer 2005.
Didier Ottinger is a curator at the Centre Pompidou. The other authors include Dominique Cousseau, Matthew Gale, and Debra B. Balken.
