"Jean Hélion: Five Decades" Exhibition

Schroeder Romero & Shredder

poster for "Jean Hélion: Five Decades" Exhibition

This event has ended.

Shredder presents "Jean Hélion: Five Decades", a retrospective of the great French painter's fifty-plus-year career. Composed of over two dozen important paintings and works on paper, the exhibition looks at the full scope of the artist's work from his acclaimed abstractions of the 1930s to his evolving figuration and scenes through the 1980s.

A vibrant and vocal young artist, Hélion was immediately influenced by Piet Mondrian's De Stijl movement, and became influential himself, founding the French avante-garde group Art Concret with Théo van Doesburg in 1930, which soon expanded to become Abstraction-Création and include the likes of Arp, Delaunay, and Gleizes. Although firm in his philosophy, Hélion's work throughout the 1930s was increasingly individualistic, moving away from Mondrian's reduced flat lines to arching curves and a far wider color palate. The exhibition features numerous drawings charting this development as well as two large and exceedingly stunning abstract canvases from this period: Equilibre, 1936 and Abstraction (Frise), 1939. Both works are prime examples of his own fully formed abstract style filled with gradated volumes and often curved overlapping planes. They are wonderfully original works that maintain a timeless freshness.

In 1939 Hélion abandoned abstraction to focus on "the life around us." Following his service in World War II, he returned to painting in 1943, committed to these bits of "everyday movement." With a continued firm line and gradated tones he focused on urban scenes: men in hats, newspapers, bicycles-all of which are represented here. Over the next forty years Hélion continued to focus his eye and brush on the scenes around him while always pushing his use of paint, toying both with flatness and quiet, vibrancy and action. Although initially regarded as apostasy by his strict modernist contemporaries, the works seen here offer a clear lineage of focus and show an artist masterfully committed to the ability of paint to show us itself and the world.

Jean Hélion was born in Couterne, France in 1904. In addition to the United States, he lived and worked most of his life in Paris, where he passed away in 1987. His work is included in important public collections throughout the world, including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo; the Tate Gallery, London; and the Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, which hosted a major traveling retrospective in 2004.

Simultaneous with the exhibition, Arcade Publishing is pleased to republish Hélion's seminal World War II memoir They Shall Not Have Me. Originally published in 1943 the text dramatically recounts Hélion's two year imprisonment and harrowing escape from a Nazi POW camp. Of the book the poet John Ashbery called it a "one-of-a-kind classic," and Time magazine proclaimed it one of the "half-dozen most remarkable books of World War II." This edition includes a new afterword by Jacqueline Hélion and introduction by Deborah Rosenthal, without whose generous support and expert coordination this exhibition would not have been possible.

[Image: Jean Hélion "Equilibre" (1936) Oil on canvas, 44 7/8 x 57 7/8 in.]

Media

Schedule

from April 26, 2012 to June 30, 2012

Opening Reception on 2012-05-17 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Jean Hélion

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