Jean Hélion or the eternal return
About the exhibition-sale of Jean Hélion's works from 1955 to 1966 held at the Alain Margaron gallery in Paris until April 30.
Blue Garden", by Jean Hélion, is one of the paintings for sale among the forty or so little-known works brought together by Alain Margaron's art gallery on rue du Perche in Paris. It is one of those canvases that are hastily painted, street scenes that are hastily sketched. A man leaves the park while another enters. We feel the sharp cold and we remain caught in the nets of this winter day, sunny to be sure. They are like that, the paintings of Jean Hélion (1904-1987): irresistible. Giacometti himself said that he could not take his eyes off them. Yet they were not favoured by the art market at the time. For the artist had betrayed himself. He, the great master of geometrical abstraction, had suddenly begun to marvel at the sight of the roofs of Paris or a cabbage under a skylight. He had become the champion of the avant-garde in the 1930s, but when the Second World War broke out, he had changed everything: he had started to paint men's heads with hats on. And now, on his return from the war, from which he had escaped to the United States after being taken prisoner in Silesia, he dared to put all his art at the service of the figurative. He dared to represent the beauties he saw everywhere in this devastated world. Without worrying about being rejected by all his former friends from Art Concret or Abstraction-Création, these artists' groups in which he frequented Mondrian, Van Doesburg, Arp, Léger, Delaunay, Gleizes, Kupka...
Jean Hélion remains a "major figure of the 20th century". As Fabien Simode reminds us in the March issue of L'Oeil, he seems to have an emotional standing inversely proportional to his recognition. Moreover, he always retained the affection of Balthus, Giacometti and Brauner. The value of the works chosen today by the Parisian art gallery is between 10,000 and 200,000 euros.
Born in Couterne, Normandy, the teenager who heard "the cannon rumbling all the time" in Amiens was still called Jean Bichier when he tried his hand at studying to be a pharmacist and then an architectural draughtsman. But he always wrote poems and mixed colours. He remained glued to the Louvre in front of the paintings of Poussin and Philippe de Champaigne. In 1921, he decided to devote himself definitively to painting. The contemporary art collector George Bine immediately allowed him to make a living from it. His first canvases were thick and figurative, before Torres-Garcia, a muralist who worked with Gaudi, taught the young Hélion, with whom he lived for a time, the rudiments of Cubism.
At the height of his art, the artist, who had always distanced himself from the doctrinaire, painted his last abstract canvas in 1939. He had already sensed this in 1935: "The more I advance, the more obvious the call of nature becomes... volumes will have to become complete: objects, bodies. It will soon be the inevitable end of nature's nose and the passage into a new naturalist era.
Nevertheless, he was one of the artists who introduced abstract art to the United States when he settled there in 1932 with his second wife Jean Blair, moving back and forth between France and Virginia. He had his first solo exhibition in New York in 1943, at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century gallery. Was the daughter of the wealthy patron and collector, Peggen Vail, sensitive to the rebellious side of this painter who was not afraid to go against the grain, to renounce the reputation he had acquired in abstract art? In any case, Jean Hélion was widowed in 1944, and the two of them got married in 1946. No more financial difficulties for him... even if they never prevented him from doing what he wanted to do.