Jean Hélion
Jean Hélion (April 21, 1904 – October 27, 1987) was a French painter whose abstract work of the 1930s established him as a leading modernist. His midcareer rejection of abstraction was followed by nearly five decades as a figurative painter. He was also the author of several books and an extensive body of critical writing.
Early life and training[edit]
He was born at Couterne, Orne, the son of a taxi driver and a dressmaker. After spending his first eight years with his grandmother, he rejoined his parents in Amiens, where he went to school. Although he experimented with painting pictures on cardboard as a schoolboy, his greater love was poetry. Interested in chemistry as well, Hélion began working as an assistant to a pharmacist in 1918, and set up a laboratory in his bedroom. He later wrote, "...I dreamed and was attracted by shapes and colors which proceeded from the reality of things and were their very essence. My passion for inorganic chemistry arose from my fondness for these shapes, these crystals, these colours, this analysis of a revealed truth."[1] In 1920 he enrolled in the study of chemistry at l'Institut Industriel du Nord in Lille (École centrale de Lille), but left for Paris in 1921 without finishing the course.
In Paris he wrote poetry and worked as an architectural apprentice. He experienced what he called the great turning point of his life while on a research project at the Louvre, where he discovered the works of Nicolas Poussin and Philippe de Champaigne, and decided to become a painter. His first paintings date from 1922–23. In 1925 he abandoned his architectural studies and began attending figure drawing classes at the Académie Adler.[2]
Personal[edit]
Hélion was married four times; his third wife was Pegeen Vail Guggenheim, the daughter of Peggy Guggenheim.[13] Helion's marriage to Jean Blair Helion produced a son, Louis Helion Blair, who was a distinguished public official, professor, and longtime Executive Secretary of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation. Helion left Jean Blair Helion and his young son to return to France, [14] apparently in response to the French declaration of war against Nazi Germany.
Legacy[edit]
While Hélion's abstract paintings of the 1930s have always been well regarded, his subsequent stylistic changes took him far from the modern mainstream, and were regarded in some quarters as apostasy,[15] although in recent years there has been a reevaluation. Artists who have acknowledged the influence of Hélion include Roy Lichtenstein,[16] Nell Blaine, and Leland Bell.[17]
Hélion's work is in many French museums, as well as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Kunsthalle Hamburg, and the Tate Gallery, London.
Most of the artist's notebooks are preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.