652
PARTISAN REVIEW
enamels. At the center of the horizontal canvas is the artist, looking
a bit perplexed, locked between one of his abstractions standing on
an easel at left, and, at right, an open window through which we see
a female nude, upended on a bed. It's a painting of transformations
taking place before our eyes. The woman's hands and feet fuse into
abstract, Arpish forms. It's a painting about the potential of abstract
forms to break into reality, and of reality to break into abstraction.
The artist's perplexity is our perplexity, the perplexity of the modern
viewer who always sees the two possibilities - the representational
along with the abstract.
In
the seventies Helion did a series of Fauvishly colored still
lifes representing hats and musical instruments.
In
1986 I saw one of
these in Helion's studio - four hats and a sculpted head sitting on the
steps ofa metal ladder-and it's held in my mind's eye ever since. An
image of a few oddly juxtaposed but unexceptional objects, painted
in full color, cut so clearly out of the flat plane of the canvas as to
achieve the effect of bas-relief. Here is a union of geometry, Sur–
realism, reality ... an image sharp , full , clear, unequivocal . Jean
Helion is one of the great artists of our time.
The American
Short Story:
A Renaissance
Seventh Annual
Key West
Literary Seminar
January
12·1.5. 1989
Join Alice Adams. Russell Banks.
Bobbie Ann Mason. Peter Taylor,
John Wideman, plus other
distinguished short story
writers, editors
&:
scholars.
•
I',,"~EL
DISCL'SSIONS·
.
READINGS·
.
ART EXlIIDlT
.
.
MEET THE AL'TIIOR ILECE.....IONS .
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