Jean Hélion
 Équilibre, 1933
(Equilibrium) Oil on canvas, 60 x 73 cm
The career of Jean Hélion (Couterne, France, 1904 – Paris, France, 1987) was a transition, with shifts backwards and forwards, from figuration to non-figuration and abstraction. He was a member of the groups Art Concret (1930–1931) and Abstraction-Création (1932) and their magazines, the two most outstanding platforms in Paris that defended abstract art at a time of crisis in the languages of art and the systems of representation. He was also a prolific writer, and in his essay “Origine et fin de mon abstraction”, which was published in Mémoire de la chambre jaune and which he began to write in 1983, he said that, contrary to what the press had reported (that he had abandoned abstraction because of his communist ideas), in the early thirties he was quite sympathetic to communist ideas and he even travelled to Moscow in 1931. Hélion admitted that at the beginning of that decade he felt great admiration for Constructivist ideas and artists, including El Lissitzky, Malevich and the two brothers, Pevsner and Gabo. From them he learnt about the avant-garde project of constructing the new ideal, instead of amusing oneself and suffering in describing it. “It seems to me,” he continued, “that it was through a gradual evolution that I abandoned Neo-Plasticism, in which I only remained for one or two years, and came to a more complete abstraction, the equivalent of the world without describing it. […] Through opposition to Mondrian’s total rigidity and Hans Arp’s soft, varied curves, I found an intermediate path that advanced by way of slanting lines, curved lines, softening of colour and volume to a more complete and more powerful utterance, one better able to withstand comparison with those works of the past that I admired so much [by Cimabue, Fouquet, Poussin or Seurat] without wishing to subject myself to imitating them.”
That is the context to which Hélion’s Équilibre belongs, and it forms part of a cluster of works made between 1933 and 1935 in which he analysed states of visual and compositional balance. The title, which is also that of the series, points directly to Hélion’s plastic concerns at the time. Preceded by the series Tensions (1931–1932), this painting brings together a number of elements that maintain a necessary relationship of equilibrium (harmony) between them in order to preserve the movement that has been given to them and that is consubstantial with them, and to balance the conflict between the forces involved in those elements. In his use of scientific terminology (tension, equilibrium), Hélion did not intend to represent or describe an immutable, stable, eternal order; on the contrary, he wished to analyse the movements, attractions, flows and circulations of the physical world. Significantly, he referred to his trapezoidal planes of colour – in this case, the intensity of the black and red and the inner softening of their colour – as if they were surfaces drawn together by a pattern marked out by the splashes made by a ball of string soaked in ink as it was unwound. Équilibre illustrates Hélion’s aim of going beyond two-dimensional geometry (characteristic of the contemporary work of Mondrian or Vantongerloo) towards a geometry of three dimensions, in which the third dimension was not spatial but temporal, referring to the duration of movement. In this way he constructed systems that were in equilibrium and in motion, and that could certainly be extrapolated to the ideal in which he was participating (a political project, a social project, an artistic project).
Since 1932, Hélion had maintained a close relationship with Albert Eugene Gallatin, who had founded the Gallery of Living Art in New York University in 1927, and he immediately became the person who helped him to define his aim and his purchase policy. In order to promote his collection, in 1933 Gallatin published a catalogue containing reproductions of the most outstanding items and a series of articles, including one by Hélion about the evolution of abstract art which referred directly to Gallatin’s collection, in which there was one of the works from the Équilibre series made that year.
Thus, not only does this work exemplify the change of direction, or of precision in language and expressive and compositional devices, that Hélion was applying in his paintings, shifting from rigid lines and clearly defined geometry to fluid forms with movement seemingly suspended in the picture space, but also, like the first canvases in the series to which it belongs (and because its execution coincides with one of the periods that he spent in the United States, before he moved to New York, in 1936, and later to Virginia), this work is at the beginning of the path that Hélion opened up, and of the part that he played in the reaction to abstract art in the United States.
References
Didier Ottinger: Jean Hélion. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2004.
Philippe Dagen: Hélion. Éditions Hazan, Paris, 2004.
Jean Hélion: Mémoire de la chambre jaune. École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1994.