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recall his shows here in the forties , and his famous conversion from
geometric abstraction to representation . There are supporters - the
painter Leland Bell, the poet John Ashbery; and young artists, ar–
riving in France, have been greeted by Helion with the same open–
ness that Mondrian and Kandinsky offered
him
half a century ago .
The decades have been dotted with exhibitions and the abstract
work has recently achieved a certain chic; but the U.S. shows, which
tend to bring only fragmentary information about Helion's various
phases , often cause only more confusion .
In Paris, in the summer of 1980, the Flinker Gallery had a
beautiful show of Helion's paintings from the fifties : freely brushed
views of Paris rooftops : interiors with tables and plants and flowers
and baguettes painted sharp and clear. The show was intense, dif–
ficult, unyielding, full. A year later, when the Robert Miller Gallery
in New York mounted an Helion show that covered some of the
same ground , only the least interesting paintings one had seen in
Paris were included. The Miller show missed all the artist's high
points. And so it has gone with Helion in New York-the disap–
pointment of shows that leave his supporters saying, "But you
haven't really seen his best work." I wonder if America will ever
catch up with Helion . Because even if a retrospective were to be
mounted , seeing this extraordinary career in one swallow would
probably prove to be too much. Helion's is one of those complex
careers that one must grow into, find one's way through.
When I was in Paris in the summer of 1986 there was no
Helion on view, either at the Pompidou Center, or at the old
Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. The Museum of
Modern Art in New York, so far as I can remember, has never
shown one (he wasn't even in their important "Contrasts of Form"
show of geometric abstraction in 1985); and the Metropolitan, which
has recently acquired several Helions, rarely shows them. In the
summer of 1987 the Pompidou put up a room full of Helions-and
one hopes it will stay in place. (After writing this, I had word that it
was down-another defeat!) The Pompidou installation included
several abstractions ,
The Cyclist
of 1939, two magnificent large char–
coal drawings of male figures , a beautiful still life of herring, and one
of Helion's most important paintings ,
A Rebours.
Painted after World
War II,
A Rebours
is, like the
Triptyque du Dragon
of two decades later,
a reflection on Helion's past and future as a painter. It's a work of
bright , smoothly painted forms surrounded by black lines ; every–
thing is given the crisp definition of the forms on Romanesque
