Hélion, Jean

Hélion, Jean (1904–1987). French painter, born at Couterne, Orne. In 1921 he moved to Paris, where he was apprenticed to an architectural firm. He began painting full-time—self-taught—in 1925. His early work—landscapes, portraits, still-lifes—was naturalistic, but he was soon influenced by avant-garde art. An enterprising and energetic man, he quickly gained many friends in the art world, including Torres-García, who introduced him to Cubism. Hélion was also influenced by Mondrian and by 1929 he was painting in an uncompromisingly abstract style. In 1930 he signed van Doesburg's manifesto Art Concret (see CONCRETE ART), and in 1931 he was a founder member of the Abstraction-Création group. Hélion's most characteristic works were done during the next few years—broadly patterned geometrical abstractions with strangely curving tube-like forms recalling the mechanistic paintings of Léger (Île de France, Tate Gallery, London, 1935). Following visits to New York in 1932 and 1934, Hélion moved to the USA in 1936 (dividing his time between New York and Virginia), becoming an important link between the European and American avant-gardes. In 1940 he returned to Europe to join the French army. He was taken prisoner but escaped and made his way back to America, where he published an account of his experiences, They Shall Not Have Me, in 1943. After the war he returned to France and radically changed his style, reverting to figurative painting and producing bold, colourful, almost caricature-like everyday life scenes. This move ‘was the result of an aesthetic and moral crisis: an interrogation of the relationship between the visible world and its significations in the context of the social and political crisis which preceded the war’ (catalogue of the exhibition ‘Aftermath: France 1945–54, New Images of Man', Barbican Art Gallery, London, 1982).