ART CHRONICLE:
Interview with Jean Helion
To throw light on
some
of the central problems of our time in art
and letters, PARTISAN
REVIEW
proposes at intervals to question important
painters, writers, and musicians in Europe and America. Jean Helion,
who initiates the series, is here questioned on his own career as well as
on the work of his contemporaries, by George
L.
K. Morris. Eight ques–
tions, with the answers as written by Hclion in the original English, are
printed below.
1.
In what wap do you find that the year you have just spent in America
has influenced the quality of your work? or has it failed to influence
you_ in any way that you can discern?
One reason for coming here was to isolate myself from the milieu
in which I had developed, and to reconsider everything. New York, so
different in every respect, has shown me how much I had been influenced
by the architecture of my own country, its density in the cities, the
proportion between free space and built space, solid and fluid, curve
and straight line, light and dark, hard and soft, and the amount of
human motion composed with it.
·
However free the artist believes himself to be in front of the canvas,
he is always handling an opposition of factors according to a scale of
proportions learned through daily experiences, and varying very slowly.
When painting an abstraction one doses these factors, that they may
react upon the different amounts of the qualities of life that have been
registered. Abstract or naturalistic, from far or near, art is always in–
fluenced by these.
A stay in a foreign country, foreign climate, foreign architecture,
provoke opinions on colors and association of colors rarely experienced
at home. The narrow amount of free space in New York has made me
conscious of other variations in my own balance of free space and occu–
pied space. After visiting any American show I have always felt by
opposition a strict pupil of Seurat and Cezanne. Yet the dark ochres,
the red bricks, the putties of your buildings, replacing the Parisian greys,
have made me develop in my palette zones corresponding to them. No
doubt, also, the violent light of New York has led me to sharper opposi–
tions of values and colors.
Those seem to be slight influences, but the sensitive part of the
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