Of Pictorial and Symbolic Balance: The Influence of the Cinquecento in Jean Hélion

Tracy Salvage

Jean Hélion was concerned with nothing less than the absolute status of painting itself—not just French painting, but all painting. He expected to transcend the illusion of reality, to reach “to the other side of the mirror” and achieve a cosmic “oneness.” In aspiring to such spiritual heights, we may think of him as the symbolic androgyne, or mercury, of art. In alchemy, mercury or quicksilver brings together opposing forces, and turns base matter into perfection. The hermaphroditic figure of the androgyne and its corresponding number, two, represent balance, the ephemeral, and the passage of time. As many belief systems do, Hélion strove to achieve true perfection by reconciling and uniting opposing forces. We think of his stunning A rebours (1947), a male and up-ended female equilibrated sublimely in color and form, yet contrary; and of his love-making mannequins in the panoramic triptych The Last Judgment of Things (1979) balanced in a moment of passion, shrouded in enigma, transcending the real.

Throughout Hélion’s lifelong quest into the very nature of painting—his early years of abstraction, constructivism, surrealism, realism, etc.—he welcomed contradiction and paradox, and constantly disrupted our assumptions. He did not settle for the status quo of any system or movement. He was a tricky shape-shifter, the very essence of mental transformation in search of “oneness,” all the while throwing many off course. Despite his courageous grappling with doubt and despair in his journals, he was always steadfast. Yes, there is that familiar umbrella appearing again and again, often protecting the inhabitants of his paintings from rain, but just as often folded and propped against a doorway, heralding the extreme introspection required to enter another state of consciousness—one where the poet dreams his dream, as in Grande mannequinerie (1951).

In the early days of abstraction and constructivism, Hélion’s artist-friends such as Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg were also searching for a universal order in art. This dream entailed finding painterly equivalents to music, “raising monuments of space,” or creating an environmental arrangement of paintings such that “the canvas. . .is a public square in which the image will be built like a monument.” And yet Hélion was also conscious of the artist as an intermediary of history, of questions raised in one generation and responded to and transformed by the next. Indeed, he considered all aspects of art history—he looked near and far, and found deep affinities with the Venetians. In the 1950s and 1960s, he frequently visited relatives in Venice, and viewed church paintings there. Veronese’s The Marriage at Cana, a thirty-two-foot work executed expressly for San Giorgio Maggiori in Venice he viewed in The Louvre.

In a particularly poignant passage in his journal, Hélion writes out a bilan, or balance sheet, of his experiences over thirty years, and notes that, at fifty-two, he was humbled when standing before a work of Veronese’s in the Louvre. The very next day he had a flash of insight: “I see All. Think, feel, conceive All. Color and construct All.” For Hélion, the day-to-day search for a transcendent order translated into probing formal issues of compositional and coloristic balance. Yet throughout his career, he seemed captivated not only by his ideal of pictorial equilibrium, but also by the symbol of the scale, and by the act of judgment—the weighing of thought and material existence, the sacred and the profane. This interest culminated in The Last Judgment of Things, one of his late works. Exhibited for the first time in New York City in 1996, it reconciled his painterly and intellectual concerns in a supreme and definitive balance.

This late work summarizes formal practices and philosophical musings, and leads us to connect Hélion to the Cinquecento master Paolo Veronese (1528-1588), whose The Marriage at Cana (1562-64) predicates pictorial structure, balance, and an alchemical creation—Christ’s transformation of water into wine—as does Hélion’s triptych. According to the art critic Jed Perl, “In the Last Judgment we’re present at the act of creation, with people and objects appearing out of the thin air of acrylic paint.” And like The Marriage at Cana with its wedded couple at the far left of the canvas and its divine couple, Mary and Christ in the center, Last Judgment introduces us to an embracing couple at left and an enigmatic union at center. Both works are of a metaphysical realm, treating earthly and spiritual mysteries.

Moreover, each of these two masterworks treats an allegorical, Christological theme in a contemporaneous manner—Hélion’s, in terms of a throng at a Paris flea market with its profusion of merchandise, and Veronese’s, in terms of a luxurious sixteenth-century Venetian wedding banquet with cosmopolitan guests and resplendent goods framed by the classical architecture of Andrea Palladio. Hélion was as intrigued by architectural possibility as Veronese. His quest for balance between theory and practice in his art, and the integration of other disciplines (mathematics, theater, architecture) into painting attest to Hélion’s quest for formal structure and equilibrium. He may be considered a modern-day Vetruvius, a master architect who expounded on such orders in his treatises during the first century B.C.E. In fact, Hélion came to Paris in 1921 to become an architect. Nearly sixty years later, he was still concerned with architectural dimensions. His overall design and use of major structural forms in Last Judgment looks to the Cinquecento, and particularly to Veronese, for the structure upon which to build his 27-foot painting.

Certainly, it falls within the traditions of painting to enter into dialogues with the past. In Last Judgment, Hélion not only remembers the flea markets of Paris from his own younger days, but also the past to which he as a painter is heir. His friend Balthus hearkened back to the mathematical rigor and formal precision of Piero della Francesca’s processionals in such works as La rue (1933-35) and Le passage du Commerce Saint-André (1952-54).

Hélion’s triptych, like Veronese’s The Marriage at Cana, was painted toward the latter part of his career, and both artists were underestimated at their deaths. The Renaissance master’s contribution, in relation to those of his Venetian contemporaries in the Cinquecento, Titian and Tintoretto, remained unreconciled at his death—perhaps not unlike Hélion in relation to Matisse and Picasso.

By reexamining Hélion’s earlier works and comparing his Last Judgment of Things to Veronese’s painting and late Renaissance forms in sacred music and architecture, it becomes clear that Hélion is preoccupied with scales in many senses—as representing weight and balance, the act of thought or judgment, the scala coelestis or heavenly stairs, and the idea of scale in music, architecture, and as tonal value in painting. He may even have used some of these themes to pun about the judgment the world had made of his endeavors. Cognizant of being underestimated, Hélion seemed to look to the next generation for a fuller appreciation of his work’s complexities.

Whatever the style, Hélion sees things in terms of “moment,” of philosophy or meaning, of a thing he is probing; and he considers the stability of structures. We can witness this in earlier works such as Tensions circulares, Orthogonal, etc., but such a framework exists in his realistic pictures as well. In fact, Hélion writes of seeing a leg of beef slung across a butcher’s shoulder as if it were an architectural problem, defining the points of “tension,” the “nave” of the carcass, while the white apron of the butcher “constructs itself in columns to support the animal.”

In his late twenties, Hélion produced bold, spare abstractions featuring shapes which resemble a beam with two scales, such as Equilibre (1933-34). Forms are modeled lightly to indicate mass and spatial dimension, and seem to allude to interior rooms. Subsequent paintings such as Figure (1938-39) and Figure tombée (1939) show him equilibrating the simplest of colored shapes interspersed with crisply modeled cylinders to suggest a human form in an interior. Here, all the complexity of the figure, light, and space are distilled into a harmonious construction. The whole is a carefully conceived sum of its parts, and the success of his quirky compositions of shape and hue hang precariously in the balance. He seems to have concurred early on with Palladio’s ideal that “beauty will result from form, from the relationship of each part to the whole. . .so that the [structure] becomes a complete, well-finished body whose every limb is necessary to reach the final objective.”

Despite a dramatic shift to a figurative mode, in Au cycliste (1939) Hélion continued his preoccupation with placing formal elements to achieve a precise compositional stasis and, yet again, to form an image of the scale. Here, a prototypical urban Everyman, suited, umbrella in hand, a fedora shading his visage, strides from his front door on his way to work in the early morning light. His mannequin-like posture is encased by the crisp black of the doorway as if in a monumental vertical block. Thus this anonymous actor serves as the central beam in the artist’s iconographic cityscape. On either side of this white-collar clone are two figures—an anonymous cyclist to his left and a woman at an open window on his right, her hands clasped around a potted plant whose stem rises stiffly between her breasts. These adjunct figures sit on rectilinear areas of flat muted color, looking like weighing pans in relation to the beam-like structure of the man. The composition’s strict structural rhyming calls to mind the calculated elegance of a mathematical equation, as seen in Renaissance works.

Given the context of the period—the advent of mechanization, the rise of fascism, the bureaucratization of government and industry, the labor movement—and the artist’s formal preoccupations, the unfolding narrative of the painting appears to represent a disturbing wrinkle when these self-contained inhabitants of a modern no-man’s-land are “freeze-framed” in a disquieting equilibrium. In fact, the element of time is used to coordinate, in the complex formal structure, historical reference as well as narrative sequence. What is seemingly a moment in a mundane morning cityscape calls to mind something of the psychological power of Sartre’s La nausée (1938), in which we feel all too clearly the nothingness in the core of modern life.

Hélion builds on his concern for balance and structure like an architect, but he also pushes color for maximum impact. Whereas in previous works he used a muted palette to represent the scales of tonal value, in La belle etrusque Hélion employs a hot orange hue for almost the entire surface of the canvas, and creates tone with flat areas of pale pinks, yellows, and warm browns, using chromatic brilliance rather than lights and darks as Veronese did in late works. In this daring painterly feat—bizarre subject matter, outrageous color, and downright wacky drafting—he again invents stasis, teetering on the brink of new possibility.

In the early 1950s, the tone of Hélion’s work changes to detachment, to a sense of withdrawal and philosophical musing. These works are mostly somber, pensive studio scenes of still lifes, models, and self-portraits. Instead of viewing naturalism as a detente in his career or a slackening of inventiveness, Hélion consciously employs realism in the service of unorthodoxy, as abstraction itself was becoming restrictive.

In 1954, in a realist self-portrait entitled Le peintre, he depicts himself in the act of weighing. He wrote about his uncompromising inner motivation: “Painting becomes an avowal of faith in the validity of existence.” In Le peintre, we find the genesis for The Last Judgment of Things as Hélion seems to weigh the intangible against the material, abstraction against reality, the sacred against the profane. Here, he is not only“the painter,” but also the thinker, the philosopher. In this full-length self-portrait in oil on canvas, Hélion places himself in front of an easel flanked by two others in a large studio space. His left foot abuts a small stool, while his elbow, resting on his knee, supports his chin in the classic “thinker” pose. A blank canvas is on the easel directly behind him while the flanking easels are bare. The act of pondering is juxtaposed with a profusion of objects scattered around the room. Hélion’s logic for compositional balance prevails again as assorted furnishings and objects—a bench, a cot, stacked canvas stretchers, a plant—are situated in the foreground of the studio, while on the left a staircase winds upwards onto a terraced landing. Le peintre is a first foray into Christological subjects, and foreshadows his Last Judgment of twenty-five years later. People transfixed in a moment of thought as Christ turns water into wine, a proliferation of objects, and staircase with landing are also major elements of The Marriage at Cana.

In his self-portrait Hélion is balanced in motion, equilibrated in the act of thinking. Camus wrote that “the revolutionary spirit felt that. . . there was consent in art [history]; that there was risk [in] contemplation counterbalancing action.” Like his cycliste, Hélion is momentarily “freeze-framed,” then moves on to work out the complexities of his painting. Alone in his studio, he looks out past the picture plane, indicating that it is only in the self that the drama of truth can occur. And it is in the risks of the fifties—returning to a mode of realism from which to resolve the contradictions between tonal value and flatness of the canvas field, seeking more profound metaphors for humanist issues—that we find the genesis of Hélion’s long, inexorable procession toward his apotheosis, The Last Judgment of Things, painted when he was seventy-five.

Hélion’s Last Judgment shares the organizing vision of the Renaissance world, in which knowledge is unified by metaphysical principles. Just as in the Cinquecento, Hélion thought of painting as inseparable from other disciplines such as architecture, theater, mathematics, and music.

In locating his work in art history, Hélion finally seems able to reconcile inner and outer dimensions, private and public realms—as earlier on, art and religion had channeled emotion. In his Last Judgment, he transcends those tensions in a moment of order and equilibrium, the meaning inextricably locked into the form. Only those who understand the structure can fully decipher the meaning, like a Renaissance puzzle. Sitting in Hélion’s chapel, surrounded on three sides by his painting, we hear the very song which emanates from his Venetian-inspired “colorito.” In its present placement of three canvases on one wall, Last Judgment is viewed all at once, in the space of a moment; but as placed on three walls in the clockwise-wraparound sequence of the oratorio, it can only be apprehended like a piece of music—through time. Thus Hélion keys his colors to the triadic harmonies of Renaissance music, a mathematical scale of measured time. Indeed, his triptych is about the passage of time—hearkening back to the Paris flea markets of his youth, to his life and work, and to his painterly heritage of over four hundred years.

Symbolically, Hélion includes a small hourglass in the third canvas of the triptych, a Christological allusion perhaps drawn from The Marriage at Cana. In Veronese’s work, it sits upon the musician’s table but bears no literal significance to the playing of music, as a metronome would; instead, it relates to Christ’s realization, “Mine hour is not yet come.”

Thus Hélion’s Last Judgment is a simultaneous rendition of all scales, a final tour de force. Yet for some the question may remain: Why construct not just a painting, but an imaginary chapel and hymn as well? Perhaps because a mural is a public creation, and Hélion was an intensely private person, an internal exile, not chiefly devoted to the struggle for honor, but engaged in his art.

Even Picasso only likened himself to Christ in his Ecce Homo: Le theatre de Picasso prints (1970), based on Rembrandt’s prints of Christ Presented to the People (1655). His aquatint Horse with rider and man with fantastic head-dress (1970) is only an excerpt of attendant figures from Rembrandt’s drypoint The Three Crosses (1653). And Matisse’s chapel wasn’t to provide self-aggrandizement, but to adorn a house of worship, thus enhancing the devotional practice of others. Hélion, instead, seems to have humbly assumed the mythic role of the playful, childlike trickster. In The Last Judgment of Things, he alternately guides us to and bars us from the act of witness. Indeed, he himself seems Veronese’s mischievous Cupid, who both leads the viewer, like Mars’s warhorse, to apprehend the union of the gods atop the spiral staircase as in Mars and Venus Interrupted by Cupid (1561) and, as in Mars and Venus Bound by Cupid (1578), he restrains us—as he does the curious horse—from viewing that most passionate of mysteries, as well as the mysteries of his own creative processes.