JED PERL
641
Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo ,
Standing Figure,
the colored planes
wrap around one another into a torso and head with the powerful
heroic anonymity of a Cycladic idol. This is a silver-toned, porce–
lain-hard version of Leger's brash style of the disks of 1918. The
smooth surfaces keep being disturbed by queer conflicting forces .
The writer Pierre Brugiere, who met Helion at Arp's house,
recalls seeing hanging above Helion's worktable in 1934 reproduc–
tions of Poussin and Fouquet - and that bow to the tradition of
French art, amid the idealism of abstraction , suggests Helion's reser–
vations about the self-sufficiency of abstract art . When HeIion, in
1934, resigned from Abstraction-Creation, it was "because of Van–
tongerloo's austerity - he was a real purist - and also because of
Herbin. They were both very much anti-Surrealist. As far as I was
concerned, Surrealism was also a brand of freedom, so abstraction
could not be opposed to it." In 1933 , on a page of a notebook that
contains a line drawing of a hand, he had written: "The superiority
of nature is that it offers the maximum of complex relationships ." In
1934, in
Cahiers d'Art,
he was explaining that abstraction and repre–
sentation are in some way commensurate, equally real .
Still, it wasn't until 1939 that Helion was painting representa–
tional paintings - a series of men's heads topped off with fedoras .
Given how figural Helion's abstractions had recently become, this
return to reality wasn't exactly a surprise; and yet I don't think one
can offer any simple explanation for Helion's divorce from abstrac–
tion . Dissatisfactions and anomalies build up - but what ultimately
tips the balance is really impossible to say. This is how Helion
recently described his development in the later thirties :
I had gone to America in 1936, partly because of the American
relations I had through my wife, partly to get away from the en–
vironment in which I had come to abstraction. I settled in New
York to regain my freedom, but it so happened that my reputa–
tion as an abstract painter began to attract those very artists to
me who , after years of representational painting, felt tempted by
abstraction and the freedom it implied. So I withdrew to Vir–
ginia, to go my own way. I turned to nature , which they were
escaping from ; we met going in opposite directions .
Surely it's significant that the first figures aren't so much portraits of
individuals as portraits of social types . The men are defined more by
their headgear than by their faces - they're symbols of a new lower-
