Jean Hélion
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Jean Hélion
Paul Holberton Pub., c2004
English ed
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Note
Exhibition catalogue
"This book accompanies the exhibition of the same title at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 8 December 2004-6 March 2005 ... The exhibition is also shown at the Museu Picasso, Barcelona, 17 March-19 June 2005 and, in reduced form, at the National Academy Museum, New York, 14 July-9 October 2005"--P. [2]
Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-209) and index
Contents of Works
- Hélion: the art of declaration / Didier Ottinger
- Hélion: the world as prose / Henry-Claude Cousseau
- Hélion: and British art, 1933-1937 / Matthew Gale
- Jean Hélion's American connections / Debra Bricker Balken
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Jean Helion (1904 - 1987) is a fascinating artist from many points of view. An architectural draughtsman soon converted to abstract painting, he became a leading member of the international Abstraction-Creation group in the early 1930s. After the death of his friend Theo van Doesburg he took abstraction to New York, where he advised the avantgarde 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. During the years 1933 - 37 he was also in close contact with Ben Nicholson and other avantgarde artists who took refuge in Britain at that time. He certainly has a significant place in the history of modernism between the wars. Even more interesting is the direction Helion's art subsequently took, although it was against the trend in returning to figuration. Looking back, one can see that he was one of the strongest and best artists painting in the 1950s, who is due for reappraisal. In 1940 Helion returned from New York to France, in order to enlist. As soon as he was mobilized he was captured, but escaped in 1942 (and wrote a book about it, They Shall Not Have Me, 1943).
He never returned to America after 1946. After the war he evolved a unique language of painting, employing people-objects that are both constructivist and naturalistic to a varying degree - his own language of signs populated by characteristic figures such as shopwindow dummies, newspaper readers and startling nudes. Helion is a key figure in the development of abstraction on both sides of the Atlantic and the Channel between Picasso and Pollock. This book is the first in English on the artist for some thirty years. It accompanies a retrospective commemorating the hundredth anniversary of his birth at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Authors include Didier Ottinger, curator at the Pompidou, Matthew Gale, writing on Helion's English connections, and Debra Bricker Balken, on the American links.
by "Nielsen BookData"