Page 54 - Studio International - June 1965

Jean Helion now

by Sheldon Williams
1

At 21 Jean Helion met Georges Bine who gave him a contract.
He abandoned his architectural studies and has been a full-time
painter ever since. The only breaks in the continuity of his work
came when he did his military service in 1927. and during the
Second War when he was taken prisoner by the Germans. escaped
and made his way to the United States (1942). and did not paint
again until September 1943. Helion is now 61.
Last year a large retrospective exhibition of his life's work was
shown at the Gallery of Modern Art. New York-and this month
a similar exhibition is on show at the Leicester Galleries. London.
The course of his career has not always run smoothly. He has
been lionised-during the Thirties-yet in 1931. his friend Pierre
Bruguiere writes ·. a hard year, the work austere and mis­
understood. Never was misery so severe·.
The War and his experiences in the German prison camp were
an hiatus and a trauma. During his first year in the United States.
he could not paint. Instead, he embarked on a series of lectures
and wrote his book They Shall Not Have Me'. When he fin;illy
felt he could once more face his colours and canvases. his work
took on new forms. It was really at this point that the new Helion
appeared. All at once. the cerebral compositions of the Thirties no
longer satisfied him. He needed the proximity of nature. Ever
since. he has worked towards a goal of synthesis with reality.
He himself stoutly denies that there has been any basic revolution
in the aims and intentions of his work. He points out. reasonably,
that he is a classical artist. concerned with the demands of com­
position. Style or manner is no more than the outward clothing of
2
the picture's essence. Nevertheless. the imminence of reality
has unquestionably brought marked differences to his work.
Classical, yes . Helion has never made any secret of the fact
that his heroes are Courbet and Poussin. Before the War, he
repeatedly drew attention to the rhythmic qualities in the
paintings of these two artists. It was. he said. their 'double
rhythm' that he sought to reintroduce in the modern idiom into his
own pictures. Their classical severities and the sense of weight­
lessness (even in the most ponderous of subjects) called for a
clear colour range and-so Helion believed at the time-a hard­
edge style in painting. Both these elements in his work reappeared
in the U.S. paintings of the Forties and continued through into
the early Fifties.
It was round about this time that the Surrealists sought to claim
him but. although he was prepared to accept Breton's invitation to
exhibit with them. he would not accede to a more formal alignment
with the movement.
Meanwhile. cultural interpreters were doing their best to give
esoteric meaning to the changes that had come about in his work.
A favourite motif in his earlier paintings of this period was the
chapeau melon. Because the eyes of a young man were hidden
beneath the tipped brim of his bowler. some pundits maintained
that this was a direct result of Helion·s experiences as a prisoner
of war, a symbol to prove that he was not yet fully rehabilitated
and able to face the realities of the world. A further painting in
which one eye was visible they accepted as confirmation of this
theory. The appearance of one eye showed that he was gradually
coming to terms with life again. Obviously the time would one
day come when both eyes were painted and Helion·s restoration
to normality would be complete. None of this nonsense is given
any support by the artist. In each case it was the exigencies of
the design and composition that called for one eye. more or less.
and he refuses to be bound by symbolic behaviour not to paint a
one-eyed man unless he is once more locked up in a prison camp.
It was not until 1957 /58 that his style finally crystallised­
possibly for the last time.
My own experiences of Helion·s work had been confined to his
file-war pictures. but I was in Paris in the Summer of 1958 and
paid a visit to Christian Zervos· Galerie Cahiers d'Art. This small
Left Bank gallery. which normally exhibits abstract and surrealist
painting, was full of paintings of the roofs of Paris. I did not
recognise the style of the painter and I was surprised to find such
pictures in Zervos· gallery. I was also very pleased. After the
bonne cuisine of much of what I had seen that day, these roof­
scapes seemed honest in an austere way that was salutary. Only
the colours implied a strange difference. Although the pictures
themselves were powerful and evocative, it was the colours that
268