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PARTISAN REVIEW
wisest and most generous-hearted of all the adventurers of modern
art. Even as I write these pages, the testimonies of his gift for friend–
ship and of his infectious enthusiasm multiply at every turn. The
catalogue of a recent exhibit at the Albemarle Gallery in London
contains an open letter to Helion from Myfanwy (Evans) Piper, a
figure in the English avant-garde. She recalls how more than fifty
years ago she'd first come to Helion's studio in Paris. "It was August:
the life of the city was suspended in heat and emptiness, everyone
had gone away except you and other artists who couldn't afford
to - Mondrian, Brancusi, Kandinsky, Domela, Giacometti among
them, all of whom I subsequently, through your introduction,
visited." She continues: "Jean-your eloquence and sparkle both in
French and in English (luckily for me) left me spellbound. So we
got on . I remember staying, that first day, an unconscionable time
. . . and walking back through the unfamiliar dark streets in a state
of high exhilaration."
As it happened, the catalogue containing this letter was
brought to me from Paris by a painter friend who'd just, on her first
trip to Paris, visited Helion. (She must have been among his last
American visitors.) And my friend's story of her visit with Helion
and his wife Jacqueline seemed to have an open-sesame dimension
much like that of Myfanwy Piper's visit all those years ago. Of
course Helion could no longer offer a young artist introductions to
that list of artists-he'd outlived them all; but the shining en–
thusiasm that put everything in the realm of the possible, this was
present to the very end, in the blue eyes, the rapid speech, the art–
filled atelier . My friend described the call to Helion's apartment, and
Jacqueline answering, "Come over today at five." Then the apart–
ment building near the Luxembourg Gardens; the uncertain climb
up the odd little flight of stairs to the penthouse; then the terrace
with its magnificent gray and white and coffee-colored vista of Pari–
sian rooftops . And one's immediate exclamation , "But that's the
roof-scape Helion has painted!" The beautiful rooms with their
oddly sloping ceilings. The exclamation over a white tureen on a
sideboard that one knows from the paintings, and this starting off
the presentation by Helion and his wife of a parade of paintings, a
cascade of half a century's work. My friend's answering, "Brooklyn,"
to Helion's question, "Where do you live?" elicits the story of Mon–
drian's funeral in a Brooklyn cemetery . And on and on. And after a
few hours and the good-byes, my friend is, like Myfanwy Piper all
