640
PARTISAN REVIEW
with some advocating the most absolute rigor and others the
greatest possible freedom. Though we apparently went in dif–
ferent directions, actually, as befits artists, we tried to grasp
every aspect of the truth, from one extreme to the other.
Like Giacometti, Helion went to school with the Parisian avant–
garde of the early thirties, created his first mature work with a
vocabulary borrowed from older artists, and only later, at the end of
the decade, embarked on a return to reality - his "different direc–
tion."
There is to Helion's art and career in the thirties an interna–
tional cast. Abstraction-Creation, though formed in Paris, reflected
the idealism of nonfigurative art as it had evolved in Holland, Ger–
many, Russia; and Helion's travels during the period - to Russia,
where he met Tatlin, and to Berlin, where he met Naum Gabo- re–
flected a transnational brotherhood of abstract art. Helion also
visited America, for the first time in 1932, long before World War II
brought many Parisian artists to the States. Unlike so many French–
men, he learned English perfectly. He assisted Albert Gallatin in
putting together his great collection of abstract art (which became
the Gallery of Living Art at New York University), befriended the
young American painters, and encouraged the formation of the
American Abstract Artists groups. Much of this long-submerged
history of abstract art in the thirties has floated to the surface in re–
cent years, and Helion's name now has a certain currency in
America among those who read scholarly articles and exhibition
catalogues. Indeed, his abstract period has by now been gone over so
often that it comes as something of a shock to realize that he painted
abstractly for little more than a decade. But however Helion chose to
paint in later years, he always bore the stamp of the thirties, with its
fervent hopes and hard realities.
Helion's compositions of the mid-thirties, in which the
geometry of the Abstraction-Creation group engages with a Sur–
realism that "breaks down barriers and causes unexpected constella–
tions of images to flower," are an essential landmark of the art of the
time. It's the convergence of abstract idealism and Surrealist fluidity
that makes for the haunted period flavor of these works. They're im–
personal, muffled, expectant, somberly beautiful. Helion's cylin–
der-, helmet-, and bullet-shapes, modelled in rich, pearly tones
(Clement Greenberg once called the color Vermeerish), look to have
been surprised into space. In the beautiful 1935 abstraction in the
