JEAN HÉLION
Couterne (France), 1904 – París,(France) 1987 

While he was an apprentice draughtsman working in an architect’s studio in Paris he discovered the paintings of the great Dutch and French artists at the Louvre; the work of Cézanne and the Fauves influenced the style of his first urban landscapes. In 1926 he created the magazine L’Acte, in which he published his first writings. Torres-García introduced him to Cubism and Surrealism, but it was the work of Van Doesburg and Mondrian that turned his paintings towards abstraction, the first examples of which were exhibited at the Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona in 1929. He was a co-founder of Art Concret (1930) and Abstraction-Création (1931). His adoption of pure geometry became evident in his first solo exhibition, at the Galerie Pierre Loeb in 1932. The following year he exhibited in the United States, where he lived from 1936 to 1939, during that period the increasing use of toned-down colours, modelling on surfaces and effects of depth indicated an abandon of strictly abstract languages and the adoption of a figuration to which he returned definitively at a point that coincided with the outbreak of war.
After being confined in a prison camp from 1940 to 1942, he escaped to New York. He returned to Paris in 1946, and there he created a reduced display of characters (hommes assis, journaleries, mannequineries, naked women) and personal icons (bread, carnation, pumpkin, hat, umbrella), which enabled him to play with the real and the allegorical on the same plane –taking the ordinary world as his starting-point- and at the same time take up a position against the Informalism that was dominating the art scene at the time. In this context, despite far from favourable reviews, in the early fifties he radicalised his attitudes by incorporating the copying of the natural into his creative process and moving from more intellectual figuration to a language that was formally more naturalistic and also more lyrical. The circus and public places such as markets and the use of acrylic and large formats became the dominant features in his work in the mid-sixties, leading to a period of renewed acclaim that culminated with the major retrospective held at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris in 1970. In 1983 he became blind and gave up painting in order to write theoretical texts and his autobiography.