ACravan: My Time After Awhile (1): Jean Helion

I would like to present a couple of excellent pictures by Jean Helion, a 20^th century French painter who interests me, and crib a few lines from an article by Merlin James, published in The Burlington Magazine in April 2005, about Helion.

One very good thing about having led an intellectually interrupted life is that it makes it very easy not to pontificate because of over-education or having acquired too much information along the way. (One period of clarity mixed with confusion gets replaced by another and then another.)

Although one desires and seeks accurate and more complete knowledge (about everything), perhaps the residue of early training and instinct, combined with a more relaxed mind and eye, have helped me by now discern the forest for the trees a little, patterns in the landscape, and I feel a little less stuck than I used to on details that just catch, impede, and suddenly and painfully tear like nail-ends protruding from a wall. In art, as in everything else, “lying equals many tears”. That’s a line in a poem that I like a lot.

Also, I’d like to say (to someone, possibly on a series of roadside billboards or a Times Square sign), “you lost me at 'post-modern'”. Neologisms and silly nomenclature are mainly obfuscation. As Lou Reed once observed about slang (speaking about why he tried not to include it in his lyrics), nothing “dates” you faster.

All of this is a way of saying that some people love Jean Helion’s art and others dislike it greatly and regard him as mediocre and retrograde.

Merlin James:

“But in fact it is mistake to concentrate on Hélion’s strategic manoeuvring – on where he stands, what he stands for – at the expense of responding to his works themselves. Celebrating his contrariness, his provocative diversity and unpredictable stylistic manners, is paradoxically to risk doing him a similar disservice as did those who once criticised him for stepping out of line with the avant-garde. What counts is not, as such, that he repudiated abstraction (and then skirted around other movements such as surrealism, post-war realism or Pop). He did so only as a consequence of making the works he felt compelled to make. Parading painting’s affective and semantic potential, his pictures cry out to be critically appreciated and interpreted, not just endorsed as some ‘alternative’ to a discredited – or still tacitly accepted – mainstream canon.”

“Seurat and Poussin were among Hélion’s acknowledged masters at the time, and while he wrote of them (in the progressive Axis magazine and elsewhere) in formalist terms, his own pictures announce their affinity with past art in subtle ways hardly done justice to by truisms about shared visual rhythm and structure. An abstract canvas by Hélion is recognisably the same category of object as a David, a Louis Le Nain or a Ucello, not least in making the viewer hyperaware of the a skin of paint on a surface, actively and, as it were, continually (re-)generating and sustaining the image.”

“With “Cyclist," (1939) inaugurates the window-and-door dramas, the passing cyclists, the gents with umbrellas, the smokers, the opposition of ‘in’ and ‘out’ – all common in Hélion. "Défence D’," (1943) announces his creed of semantic continuum, from written word through visual representation to ambiguous or abstract colour and form. The hat brim covering the eyes in this, as in so many paintings, flags notions of inner and outer sight, identity and anonymity. "The Stairs" (1944) introduces blindness, (an increasing concern up to the loss of Hélion’s own sight late in life) and enshrines the key principles of ascent, descent, rotation, pairing. "Wrong Way Up" (1947) with its gallery frontage displaying an abstract picture, begins the symbolic juxtaposition of art and reality and the play between shop window and street life. The ubiquitous newspaper readers are definitively assembled on a park bench in "The Big Daily Read" (1950).””