Alon Zakaim Fine Art

“A summary of my history is as follows:
In 1929, demolished the world I lived in.
In 1930, cancelled this world reduced to three lines.
From there, rebuilt a universe: 1932.
Then restarted populating it with abstract beings, 1932-33, etc., complete beings, 1935-36 (standing figures) and collapsed ones (fallen figures), 1939 - before the war.
In 1939, the war: destroyed my world yet again. On my return restarted repopulating a new world with characters that had the soul of the abstract standing figures of 1936, etc.
Then, when these characters had grown up, undertook to make gods out of them and bring together the important movements of the flesh and of thought, according to a new mythology.”

‘Journal d’un peintre’, vol. I, 14th October 1947, p. 105

Jean Hélion arrived in Paris in 1921, initially to train as an architectural apprentice. His interest in painting grew from the many hours he spent in the Louvre where he particularly admired the work of Nicolas Poussin and Philippe de Champaigne. His first paintings date from 1922-1923, and by 1925, having attracted the attention of the collector Georges Bine, he devoted himself entirely to painting.

Hélion exhibited for the first time in 1928 at the Salon des Indépendants. The works of this period, predominately nudes and still lifes, gave way to a vocabulary of abstract geometric forms. In 1930 Hélion came storming onto the modern art scene when, with Théo van Doesburg, Otto Carlsund and Léon Tutundjian, he founded ‘Art Concret’, the first French avant-garde movement committed to radical abstraction.

Recognized internationally as a leading figure of modernism, Hélion’s activism was not limited to home: in England he helped start the review Axis, and in the United States his studio became a hive of information on the modern movement in Europe.

Hélion’s move to the United States in 1936 coincided with a gradual move towards figuration. In the course of just a few years he evolved towards a style whose formal vocabulary began with a return to the curve and then to volume.

Shortly after joining the French army in 1940, he was taken prisoner. In 1943 Hélion published his book, ‘They Shall Not Have Me’, in which he recounted his extraordinary story of Nazi captivity in Stalag II, Pomerania and Stettin, and subsequent escape. Returning to Paris in 1946, Hélion set up a home and studio at 4, rue Michelet, where he worked for the rest of his life.

In a later interview he described his move away from abstraction in terms of a direct response to the effects of the war: “It happens that for me abstraction came to an end with the war, which was a great upheaval of ideas, the advent of nameless misfortunes and catastrophes. Through all these misfortunes they [other artists] were able to carry on doing the same thing….but I couldn’t do the same. I was in a turmoil...” (Conversation with Jean Hélion, ‘L’indécence d’aimer’, from the journal ‘ArTitudes’, nos. 21-23, 1975, p. 79)

In the late forties Hélion’s return to realism focused on an introduction of the outside world into his studio: fruit, shoes, carnations, bread, hats, newspapers, umbrellas – they all formed part of his everyday vocabulary. In 1947 he painted À rebours, a key work that marks a move towards an art that draws most of its subjects from the spectacle of life in the street.

Throughout his oeuvre he was preoccupied with motifs and often worked in themed sets: the end of the forties saw a focus on the modern city: journalists, people reading newspapers, workmen; the fifties saw a much more realistic approach to nudes and still-life, the sixties: shop displays, city furniture and studies of the circus; the seventies: misplaced objects, the flea market, lobsters and shoes.

Whilst in post-war France, where abstraction was riding high, Hélion’s early figurative work must have looked simply anachronistic. Some forty years later he was hailed as one of the prophets of the re-birth of figurative painting. Exhibiting alongside Balthus, Bacon and Picasso in the Royal Academy’s seminal ‘The New Spirit in Painting’ exhibition in 1981, and after the 2004 -2005 Centre Pompidou retrospective in Paris, his later work is finally being given the recognition it deserves.

Récital d'automne (1980)

Acrylic on Canvas

114.0 x 162.0 cm

£ 20,000.00 GBP

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