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.

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.

"[4] The next year he was introduced to cubism by the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres-García, and in 1928 he exhibited for the first time, showing two paintings at the Salon des Indépendants.

In 1930, he joined the group Art Concret and adopted a vocabulary of abstract rectilinear form that derived from the Neoplasticists Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg.

He became recognized as a leading abstract painter, as well as an eloquent critic and theoretician whose writings were frequently published in Cahiers d'Art and elsewhere during the 1930s.

Hélion moved to the United States in July 1936, staying in New York and later Rockbridge Baths, Virginia where he built a studio.

His reading of Baudelaire directed him toward a concept of modernity in which the most ephemeral aspects of contemporary life are reconciled with the timeless and the geometric.

In a 1939 letter to Pierre-Georges Bruguière, Hélion revealed his long-range plan:For ten years I think I shall look, admire and love the life around us—passers-by, houses, gardens, shops, trades and everyday movement.

Four days later he made his way to Paris; by October he was in America, where he spoke on radio and in lecture halls in support of Free France.

Deliberative as always, he painted many close variations on favorite themes, including women at open windows and men reading newspapers.

His friend Balthus, who had hoped Hélion would "forget Léger", expressed approval of the new works, saying, "For the first time in one of your paintings, one can feel happiness and wonder.

In one of them, Mémoire de la chambre jaune (published posthumously in 1994), he attested to having "sought out the voice of painting wherever it sings loudest.