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PARTISAN REVIEW
points of "tension," the "nave" of the carcass, while the white apron of
the butcher "constructs itself in columns to support the animal."
In his late twenties, Helion produced bold, spare abstractions featur–
ing shapes which resemble a beam with two scales, such as
Equilibre
(1933-34) .
Forms are modeled lightly to indicate mass and spatial
dimension, and seem to allude to interior rooms. Subsequent paintings
such as
Figure
(1938-39)
and
Figure tombee
(1939)
show him equili–
brating the simplest of colored shapes interspersed with crisply modeled
cylinders to suggest a human form in an interior. Here, all the complex–
ity of the figure, light, and space are distilled into a harmonious con–
struction. The whole is a carefully conceived sum of its parts, and the
success of his quirky compositions of shape and hue hang precariously
in the balance. He seems to have concurred early on with Palladio's
ideal that "beauty will result from form, from the relationship of each
part to the whole...so that the [structure] becomes a complete, well–
finished body whose every limb is necessary to reach the final objec–
tive."
Despite a dramatic shift to a figurative mode, in
Au cycliste
(1939)
Helion continued his preoccupation with placing formal elements to
achieve a precise compositional stasis and, yet again, to form an image
of the scale. Here, a prototypical urban Everyman, suited, umbrella in
hand, a fedora shading his visage, strides from his front door on his way
to work in the early morning light. His mannequin-like posture is
encased by the crisp black of the doorway as if in a monumental verti–
cal block. Thus this anonymous actor serves as the central beam in the
artist's iconographic cityscape. On either side of this white-collar clone
are two figures-an anonymous cyclist to his left and a woman at an
open window on his right, her hands clasped around a potted plant
whose stem rises stiffly between her breasts. These adjunct figures sit on
rectilinear areas of flat muted color, looking like weighing pans in rela–
tion to the beam-like structure of the man. The composition's strict
structural rhyming calls to mind the calculated elegance of a mathemat–
ical equation, as seen in Renaissance works.
Given the context of the period-the advent of mechanization, the
rise of fascism, the bureaucratization of government and industry, the
labor movement-and the artist's formal preoccupations, the unfolding
narrative of the painting appears to represent a disturbing wrinkle when
these self-contained inhabitants of a modern no-man's-land are "freeze–
framed" in a disquieting equilibrium. In fact, the element of time is used
to coordinate, in the complex formal structure, historical reference as
well as narrative sequence. What is seemingly a moment in a mundane
