Jean Hélion, whose work and drawings are the topic of a resplendent retrospective on the Musée d’Artwork Moderne de Paris, noticed artwork as perpetual experimentation. From the hard-edged geometric abstractions with which he first established a popularity within the Thirties to the immense triptychs dedicated to a Parisian avenue scene, a flea market, and the political upheavals of Might 1968 which can be his climactic achievements, Hélion was all the time testing the boundaries of what a painter may do. Regardless of his many shifts, there’s one thing cool and at instances even chilly about his work: a deliberative energy. The dramatic adjustments within the work of this artist, who died in 1987 on the age of eighty-three, counsel not the spirit of expressionist, anarchic, or romantic revolt so usually related to trendy artwork however one thing nearer to the analytical strategy we affiliate with scientific investigation. Whereas he by no means denied the inherent ambiguity of expertise, he craved readability above all else.
Writing in Le Monde simply after the opening of the exhibition, Philippe Dagen, a critic and historian extensively revered within the French artwork world, noticed that Hélion’s work, with its advanced mixture of summary and representational parts, may maintain a specific enchantment for audiences now, at a time when “most of the dogmatisms [Hélion] challenged are crumbling.” I’m not so certain. Hélion’s wide-ranging exploration of varied methods of portray was powered by a scrupulous sense of distinctions. What some might regard as his eclecticism has little in frequent with the self-indulgence of the modern artwork world, the place something goes and artists combine and match summary and representational parts fairly casually, as if all that mattered had been doing your individual factor. Hélion approached the basics of portray—how kinds slot in a rectangle, how actuality will be represented—with a philosophical precision, every construction or fashion a speculation to be examined and debated. It’s little surprise that he stays an imperfectly understood artist in Europe and a virtually unknown one in america.
A part of the problem of Hélion’s work is that it could actually really feel concurrently conceptual and precise, an concept about life delivered to life. That’s definitely true of Jugement dernier des choses (The Final Judgment of Issues, 1978–1979), the huge triptych with which the retrospective reaches a wonderful conclusion. This imaginative and prescient of a humble flea market, with individuals choosing by outdated garments and family items, is realized with a supercharged synthesis of unbridled colours and calligraphic brushstrokes. Hélion’s careening strains, expansive shapes, and cacophonous orchestration of oranges, greens, yellows, and blues enlarge and typically even confound the only actions of a person making an attempt on a pair of pants, a girl inspecting a portray, a pair deep in an embrace, and one other man carrying away a cumbersome buy. If this weren’t dissonance sufficient, the central panel of the triptych options two dressmaker’s dummies in flagrante, which provides a surreal dimension to the goings-on. Jugement dernier des choses is a brand new chapter within the explorations that Baudelaire celebrated in his essay in regards to the painter of recent life, whose mandate was to reimagine the unusual as one thing extraordinary.
Hélion embraced his instances with unusual avidity. He was within the thick of issues in Paris within the Thirties, when town was a global heart for developments in summary artwork. He established friendships with artists from throughout Europe and the Americas, together with Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, Theo van Doesburg, Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Alexander Calder, and Joaquín Torres-García. He celebrated pure abstraction and helped manage teams and periodicals that navigated the thrilling and typically maddening ideological discussions and disputes of these years. The gently curved shapes in his summary work of the mid-Thirties, every like a fraction of some silvery go well with of armor, are gathered collectively in hovering constellations, the shimmering pageantry shadowed by the last decade’s ever-darkening temper. Within the late Thirties, he assembled these curved shapes with their delicately grayed tones into figure-like kinds—what the French may consult with as a personnage. Hélion was turning away from the Platonic idealism of abstraction. In 1939 he started a sequence of male heads, stylized mugshots of the person on the street (one in all which served because the poster for the retrospective and might be seen throughout Paris).
Like most of the artists who embraced the excessive hopes we’ve come to affiliate with the fashionable motion, Hélion was keen to place his concepts into phrases. He produced a substantial variety of essays and statements, a few of them in English, a language he mastered with an ease and talent considerably uncommon among the many French on the time. In 1936 he revealed in Axis, a number one journal of the English avant-garde, an essay in reward of the seventeenth-century French classical painter Nicolas Poussin. Hélion’s considering was wealthy and complicated, with a wholesome skepticism in regards to the theories that had been already starting to show abstraction into orthodoxy. Whereas to the tip of his life he remained an important admirer of the austere achievements of Mondrian, Arp, and plenty of others, by the mid-Thirties he believed that “the modern movements have often been too near-sighted.” He nervous about “the reduction of the conception” and “the emphasis upon the particularities of the execution.”
Hélion admired Poussin for outlining what he known as “the maximum of a picture.” This artist, whose work had because the nineteenth century typically been dismissed as tutorial, struck Hélion as tougher than his detractors and perhaps even a few of his admirers imagined. Poussin, Hélion insisted, was capable of reveal “the infinity that can be got in a picture,” with smaller and bigger parts joined collectively to attain a visible intricacy all too usually described with “the usually cheaply used word ‘unity.’” (This remark might have been directed on the gospel of “significant form” preached on the time by Clive Bell, a commanding determine amongst English artists and intellectuals.) Poussin achieved what Hélion known as a “double rhythm.” He gave every a part of the portray—a determine, an object, a constructing, a tree—its personal distinctive rhythmic authority. However on the identical time Poussin was gathering collectively these splendidly various parts in an entire that was greater than the sum of its components, with facets of this or that determine, object, constructing, or tree joined in an overarching rhythm. The outcome was a totality that didn’t deny the integrity of the person parts. This double rhythm, a weaving collectively and unifying of “substance and thought,” nonetheless fascinated Hélion many years later, when he outlined his personal sort of maximalism in Jugement dernier des choses and a lot of different main work.
Within the Thirties Hélion hung out in america, the place he suggested the pioneering collector Albert Gallatin as he put collectively a set that was initially displayed in Greenwich Village because the Museum of Residing Artwork and finally turned a part of the Philadelphia Museum of Artwork’s holdings. He was excited, as so many had been, by political and social developments within the Soviet Union, however a go to there left him with reservations in regards to the Marxist experiment, which he mentioned in an interview in Partisan Overview. For a time he was married to an American he had met in Paris and located himself portray in Virginia. With the start of World Struggle II he returned to France to combat, was captured by the Germans, finally escaped from a German jail ship, and managed to make his means again to america, the place he revealed in English a memoir of his incarceration, They Shall Not Have Me, which turned a finest vendor. On the finish of the battle Hélion returned to Paris, the place he settled in an condo and studio close to the Luxembourg Gardens and, for a time, a home within the city of Bigeonnette, close to Chartres, the place he produced a few of his largest work.
It has usually been stated that it was Hélion’s experiences throughout World Struggle II that turned him from abstraction to illustration. However he was portray the determine earlier than the battle, and he by no means—or at the very least solely very briefly—noticed abstraction in the identical means as Mondrian, for whom it was the utopian decision of a battle between the true and the best that had preoccupied artists for hundreds of years. Within the late Thirties Hélion was already worrying that followers of Mondrian won’t “permit much further evolution.” “I incline,” he stated, “towards a form of modern painting that makes possible the use of the qualities of the ancient painters together with the most recent discoveries.”
In À rebours (On the Opposite, 1947), a portray that lots of Hélion’s admirers regard as summing up his pictorial predicament, the artist—a form of self-portrait—stands on the heart of the canvas, to his left a feminine nude and to his proper one in all his personal summary work. That is an allegory, with the painter’s commanding place and considerably perplexed expression suggesting a distant echo of Annibale Carracci’s The Alternative of Hercules (1596), though it might be an excessive amount of to affiliate Hélion’s alternative between abstraction and illustration with Hercules’ between Advantage and Vice. By rendering the nude feminine mannequin, the painter himself, and one in all his personal summary compositions with the identical pale palette and incisive black outlines, Hélion appears to be suggesting that the variations between varied methods of portray will be exaggerated. What at first seems a disunity offers approach to some deeper unity.
There are wonders to be found all over the place in what’s the most full exhibition ever dedicated to Hélion’s work. The work, accompanied by a beneficiant number of works on paper and an attention-grabbing assortment of documentary materials, match superbly within the massive, open galleries of the Musée d’Artwork Moderne that some bear in mind from years in the past as a bit shabby—the constructing dates to the 1937 World’s Truthful—however which have been refreshed and now have a beautiful daring feeling.
By the point museumgoers attain the work of the late Forties or early Nineteen Fifties, even these unfamiliar with Hélion’s work will discover themselves intrigued and perhaps even enchanted by a repertoire of objects, photos, and conditions that maintain reappearing. They’ll start to understand that what may at first have appeared unusual is metaphoric, symbolic, talismanic. Hélion was obsessive about umbrellas, pumpkins, hats, footwear, newspapers, musical devices, mannequins, and skulls. He beloved to color sidewalks, store home windows, and park benches, together with women and men at work and at play. He appeared to have a particular affection for the bits of flotsam and jetsam that he seen on town pavement or within the unswept nook of a room. Hélion was tirelessly, rapaciously attentive. These of us who love his work admire the totally different sorts of consideration that he may deliver to the identical object; the hat or umbrella that within the work of the Forties was handled in a crisp, flat, fairly stylized means was reimagined within the Nineteen Fifties with a brushy, nearly impressionistic complication of lights and shades, after which within the Nineteen Sixties reimagined but once more, with daring brushwork and aggressive colours. To color actuality concerned perpetually remodeling actuality.
Not every little thing Hélion did succeeded. That was within the nature of his experimental methodology. Among the excessive simplifications and stylizations that he delivered to his research of figures, metropolis streets, and nonetheless lifes within the Forties turn out to be oppressive; the cleverly curvilinear therapy of sure kinds leaves nothing to the creativeness, the schematic design foreclosing what must be a pictorial expertise. The work of the Nineteen Fifties and early Nineteen Sixties, when Hélion turned first to a sharp-focus realism and later to extra painterly, atmospheric results, typically lacks the mental playfulness that’s such a pleasure in so lots of his compositions. However I wouldn’t need to do with out Le Goûter (Afternoon Tea, 1953), an inside rendered with the insistence of a sixteenth-century Flemish grasp, wherein the late afternoon meal doubles because the revelation of a love affair, with the 2 teacups, the reduce bread, the open tin of fish, and the bottle of wine accompanied by the dishabille of a excessive heel, a girl’s slip, and a pair of pants. I additionally wouldn’t need to miss the sunshine contact and candy, delicate colours that he delivered to his research of Parisian rooftops.
Hélion made his important contribution to twentieth-century artwork when he pushed his instinctive maximalism to the restrict in work of city life. There are the three huge triptychs from the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, and there’s additionally, from round 1950, a rare sequence of work of males reclining on the bottom juxtaposed with different males who’re studying newspapers in addition to male mannequins on show in store home windows. I can’t consider something produced previously seventy-five years that may prime Hélion’s Baudelairean imaginative and prescient of city expertise; the one works that exert the same energy are Balthus’s Le Passage du Commerce Saint-André (1952–1954), R.B. Kitaj’s Cecil Court docket, London W.C.2 (The Refugees) (1983–1984), and Alberto Giacometti’s sequence of lithographs Paris sans fin (which he was engaged on on the time of his demise in 1966).
Within the cycle of melancholy work from round 1950 that culminated in Grande mannequinerie (The Nice Model Show, 1951), Hélion was at his most Baudelairean. The earlier dozen or extra years had been a time of trauma within the metropolitan facilities that had formed his social, cultural, and mental life since he first arrived in Paris within the Nineteen Twenties. In New York he had witnessed the poverty and dislocations of the Despair. He had seen Paris below Nazi rule after which, after the battle, he had lived by the challenges that accompanied Europe’s gradual restoration. With Grande mannequinerie, painted in a pointy orchestration of acidic greens, blues, oranges, and browns, Hélion was memorializing all the problem and strangeness of these instances. Reclining on the slim strip of sidewalk is a sleeping man. His matted look—a rumpled brown sweater, a foot lacking a shoe—suggests homelessness, however his sturdy options and lean physique may as simply be these of a bohemian dreamer. Above him, within the store window, are two male mannequins in elegant, tight-fitting go well with jackets and ties, their animated hand gestures and wide-open eyes suggesting a life absent from the sleeping man—and but they’re solely half-men, their torsos mounted on little steel stands. Hélion treats each facet of the portray with equal decisiveness, together with an umbrella leaning in a doorway, a fedora displayed within the store window, little bits of signage on the home windows (“TEL. 1”; “ET FILS”), the cracks within the sidewalk, and a few tiny scraps of paper fallen from a discover pasted on a wall.
That is the allegorical metropolis, town as a dream. Within the title of at the very least one of many work on this sequence Hélion referred to the sleeping man as a gisant, the time period for the recumbent sculpted figures on the tombs of medieval and Renaissance royalty. Hélion as soon as instructed me that his sleeping figures had been poets. They could nicely be the ghosts of Baudelaire, who within the poem “Le Cygne” saluted town he beloved. “Paris changes!” he exclaimed, a lot as Hélion may need as he contemplated town that he’d identified for some thirty years.
However nothing in my disappointment
Has moved! New palaces, scaffoldings, blocks,
Outdated suburbs, every little thing turns into an allegory for me.
The greatness of Grande mannequinerie is within the freedom of the allegory, the extent to which reminiscence and immediacy turn out to be one. We could also be inclined to affiliate Hélion’s preternaturally animated mannequins with the Surrealists’ curiosity in dummies and dolls of every kind, however the dramatic confrontation that Hélion creates right here between the recumbent man and the mannequins is so totally unique that precedents turn out to be irrelevant. He achieves what Baudelaire was suggesting: an allegory with out fastened which means. Hélion may also have been considering of Gustave Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio (1854–1855), which the painter known as a “real allegory,” and wherein Baudelaire will be seen on the proper, intent on what he’s studying. The person asleep on the sidewalk in Hélion’s portray is a reimagining of the determine of the flaneur, the indifferent observer of town streets, his wanderings merging along with his goals. His two toes—one shod, the opposite naked—depart him perpetually between private and non-private expertise, waking and dreaming.
Within the quarter-century after Grande mannequinerie Hélion explored the lifetime of town repeatedly. There’s a giant portray of figures within the Luxembourg Gardens, a sequence of works about butchers and butcher retailers, teams of work dedicated to individuals going out and in of the metro or gathered round a bookstall, and the three monumental triptychs, every near thirty toes lengthy: Triptyque du Dragon (The Rue du Dragon Triptych, 1967), Choses vues en mai (Issues Seen in Might, 1969; see illustration on web page 18), and Jugement dernier des choses. When Hélion was engaged on Triptyque du Dragon, which depicts an unusual afternoon on a bit avenue on the Left Financial institution, he couldn’t have identified that the upheavals of Might 1968 would precipitate a second triptych, this one dedicated to Paris as a web site of protest. Collectively the 2 compose an unlimited diptych, a juxtaposition of the common and altogether irregular dynamics of metropolis life, though sadly on the Musée d’Artwork Moderne they aren’t proven collectively; Triptyque du Dragon is within the exhibition itself and Choses vues en mai is within the foyer.
Hélion was already serious about strategy the challenges of a fancy determine composition thirty years earlier, when he mentioned Poussin’s Eliezer and Rebecca (1648) in his essay for Axis. He started by specializing in the sphere on the highest of a pilaster within the portray. From there he moved to the “almost spheric” vase at Rebecca’s foot, then to “another vase more lengthened,” after which to a girl pouring water “from a fourth vase into a bigger one,” all of the whereas suggesting how kinds unfold and unfurl, in order that one discovers
one other diploma of transformation of the unique sphere, one other perspective of vase, different dimensions, one other opposition between top and width, between a mass and its surrounding area.
Hélion introduced that very same thrilling rhythmic impulse—that sense of an unfolding pictorial drama—to Triptyque du Dragon and Choses vues en mai. In each work the important factor is a curving line or kind, by turns convex and concave, from which he was capable of assemble a person’s jacket, an arm, a girl’s buttocks, a hat, a bicycle, an umbrella open or closed, a baguette, a café tabletop, a head, a banner, a flame, a flag. Every factor, whereas distinct, is a part of the bigger sample. And since the sample is so advanced, the weather stay interlocked however unstable—as unstable as life itself. Hélion celebrates palms, faces, and full figures with curving, swinging brushstrokes. He emphasizes not anatomy or physiognomy however gesture and momentum: the dance of life.
Hélion is celebrating the richness of city expertise. Triptyque du Dragon, dominated by cloudy blues that drift into purples and greens, is about day-to-day expertise in an open society: the glass of wine on the café, the retailers promoting clothes or work, the musician performing alongside the road, the enjoyable of using a motorcycle, a few lovers in an impassioned embrace, the blind man along with his cane deftly navigating the sidewalk, and the workman down in a manhole whose upkeep and repairs maintain town buzzing. Choses vues en mai, with its dramatic, discordant orchestration of reds, oranges, blues, and blacks, is in regards to the metropolis in disruption and the protests that Hélion, like many French intellectuals with reminiscences of the unconventional Thirties, embraced to some extent, their outdated passions rekindled by a youthful era demanding a greater world. In each work Paris is a metropolis of youth, or at the very least a metropolis animated by youthful curiosity and avidity. Talking of the protesters in Might 1968, Hélion praised their “fresh, broad spirit, far in advance of what we expected.”
Hélion’s Choses vues en mai echoes Delacroix’s Liberty Main the Individuals, conceived after the artist had witnessed the upheavals of the July 1830 revolution in Paris, which stirred him, though to the extent that his politics will be discerned he was in some methods a conservative. Like Delacroix, Hélion most likely conceived of Choses vues en mai not a lot as a polemic as a celebration of human yearnings and wishes. (There’s a good essay by Éric de Chassey about Hélion’s politics within the exhibition catalog.) Hélion wrote of the triptych, “In my painting I do not demonstrate my ideas, but rather my desires, or my pleasure.” He stated that an artist’s place “is neither at the Elysée or in the Kremlin, but in the street, theater of life, for all.” Within the Eighties, after most of the hopes of the Nineteen Sixties had soured, I requested Hélion what his emotions now had been in regards to the occasions of Might 1968, and he responded, “It is good to upset things once in a while and see what’s underneath.” To upset issues however not destroy them—that was all the time his concept, whether or not in search of a greater approach to manage a society or a brand new approach to paint.
Though that is the second main museum exhibition dedicated to Hélion’s work in Paris previously twenty years, even in France his popularity stays ambiguous, a scenario that Fabrice Hergott, the director of the Musée d’Artwork Moderne, confronts within the catalog. Hergott complains that previously era a standardization of exhibition insurance policies and practices in museums all over the world has made it troublesome to discover a place for an artist who in some respects stays uncategorizable. Whereas Hélion’s work are in main collections, particularly in Europe, it’s not straightforward to situate him within the genealogies and typologies of twentieth-century artwork. Hergott makes an astute distinction: Hélion isn’t a lot a “marginal” determine—the work has a scale and a spread that defy marginality—as “a curiously decentered figure.”
Sophie Krebs, the lead curator, has finished a lot to recenter Hélion—and grant him the place he deserves in twentieth-century artwork. However your entire workforce concerned with the exhibition, at the very least from the proof of the catalog, has demonstrated an mental insularity that will have dismayed Hélion, a transatlantic determine who has all the time had a small however passionately devoted following in america. A catalog essay focuses on Hélion’s relationship in Thirties Paris with Calder, one in all a lot of American artists with whom he was buddies, however acknowledges solely glancingly the enduring nature of their friendship, which continued till Calder’s demise in 1976. Meyer Schapiro’s curiosity in Hélion is talked about; he wrote a preface for an exhibition in 1940. And that’s about all that the Musée d’Artwork Moderne catalog has to inform us about what has been an ongoing American enthusiasm for Hélion’s work. I discover this lapse or oversight—I don’t know fairly what to name it—particularly irritating after I flip again to the catalog of the Hélion retrospective that opened on the Centre Pompidou in 2004, which incorporates ample materials from American writers.
The organizers of the present exhibition might have felt that contemplating the various collections of Hélion’s writings and demanding and scholarly research of his work now accessible in French there was no must hassle a lot with American sources. Maybe they concluded that it was finest to depart america out of the image, provided that the one American account of current years that’s cited at any size—within the remaining essay within the catalog—is a rampagingly damaging assessment of an Hélion exhibition that Roberta Smith revealed in The New York Instances in 2005. I had nearly forgotten about that unusual piece of writing, wherein Hélion was described as “a brilliant sponge, but one whose command of brush, composition and color enabled him to lift his synthesis of other artists’ ideas above humdrum derivativeness.” On the time it appeared as if the vehemence of Smith’s prose was fueled by one thing greater than her rejection of Hélion’s view of creative freedom. She appeared to need to forged doubt on the attitudes and aspirations of his American admirers, who noticed on this man who understood each Mondrian and Poussin not slick methods however profound experiments.
Amongst these admirers was the poet John Ashbery, who in 1964 translated a number of Hélion’s writings for the journal Artwork and Literature and who wrote about Hélion on at the very least 5 events, together with “Jean Hélion Paints a Picture,” a considerable essay reprinted in Reported Sightings (1989), a set of his artwork criticism. Hélion’s admirers have included a few generations of American painters, amongst them Leland Bell, who championed his work in articles revealed within the Nineteen Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, and Deborah Rosenthal, who edited and launched the primary assortment of Hélion’s writings in English, Double Rhythm: Writings About Portray (2017). My very own Paris With out Finish (1988) should still be the one e-book in any language wherein Hélion’s achievement is offered on an equal footing with these of Balthus, Giacometti, Braque, Léger, and different masters of what was referred to as the Faculty of Paris.
The neglect of Hélion’s American admirers is very ironic, as a result of the artist’s transatlantic pursuits and impulses mirrored the identical willpower to interrupt out of fastened patterns that formed his advanced emotions about summary and representational artwork. For Ashbery, who knew Hélion from the years when he lived in Paris, his profession, with all its twists and trajectories, epitomized the unpredictable and incalculable prospects of the fashionable creativeness. It could be that Ashbery sensed in Hélion the identical inventive permissiveness that Individuals from the time of Gertrude Stein and Hemingway had felt within the Parisian atmosphere. Ashbery believed Hélion had “invented a new kind of description, poetic without being rhapsodic, which treats the outside of things as though it were their soul.” He noticed in Hélion’s work a contemporary, let’s-try-it spirit that defies standardization.
After Ashbery’s demise a few of his ashes had been scattered in locations that had been essential to him, one in all which was Hélion’s studio close to the Luxembourg Gardens, the place the younger American poet had spent many joyful hours. The little ceremony that occurred in December 2017 close to the location of the studio reaffirmed a Franco-American friendship that was additionally the friendship of an important poet and an important painter. In his Norton Lectures, which he titled Different Traditions (2000), Ashbery spoke about poets who, though distant from what many considered the mainstream, had meant a lot to him. This poet who was all the time alert to the seek for a convention past the mainline traditions noticed that chance in Hélion. On the Musée d’Artwork Moderne de Paris, Hélion is the chief of one other custom, one which at the very least for the current defies definition. Leaving this nice present I knew that his place is assured. What precisely that place is we are able to’t but say.
