‘A New Spirit in Painting’ was the title of a major
exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 1981. It attempted to sum up the
state of painting at that point. It was an early response to the new currents
that appeared in both painting and sculpture around 1980, and acted as a
launch-pad that brought these developments to public attention. I never saw the
show, I bought the catalogue second-hand. But I knew many of the painters in
the show. I was a regular visitor of the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven
at the time.
‘A New Spirit in Painting’ is an exhibition of the work of thirty-eight
painters. The choice is not arbitrary, but represents a critical stance. […]
The current orthodoxies about painting were defined as long ago as the nineteen
fifties by American critics and achieved almost universal acceptance during the
following decades. These orthodoxies, which had some but by no means complete
validity, aggressively proclaimed the work that was produced in and around New
York to be virtually the only universally acceptable art — anything else was at
best provincial.'
Recently one of the curators of that exhibition Norman Rosenthal ( his co-curators were Christos M. Joachimides and Nicholas Serota ) came up with ‘A New Spirit Then, A New Spirit Now, 1981-2018’ at Almine Rech Gallery, New York. The Spirit of Painting in an Altered World. By Thomas Micchelli. Hyperallergic , May 12, 2018.
There was one artist in the original show I would like to pay homage to. I’ve never seen a painting by him in real life. I was completely blown of my socks by the reproduction of a painting titled Exorcisme from 1973 in the catalogue. His name is Jean Hélion.
In the prewar years Jean Hélion frequented the international
avant-garde.
Hélion (real name Jean Bichier ) first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants
in 1928. Shortly thereafter he became acquainted with Jean Arp, Piet Mondrian,
and Antoine Pevsner. By 1929 his work was nonfigurative. With Theo van Doesburg
and others in 1930 he formed the artists' association Art Concret and the
periodical of the same name. This group was succeeded by Abstraction-Création
the next year. In 1931, after traveling through Europe and the Soviet Union,
Hélion returned to Paris, where he met Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Tristan
Tzara. His first solo show was held at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1932.
That same year Hélion made his first visit to New York, where he was given a
solo exhibition at the John Becker Gallery at the end of 1933. After returning
to Europe from a second trip to the United States in 1934, he met Jacques
Lipchitz, Joan Miró, and Ben Nicholson. In 1936 he settled in the United
States, dividing his time between Virginia and New York. That year solo shows
of his work took place at the Galerie Cahiers d'Art in Paris and the Valentine
Gallery in New York. The artist traveled to Paris in 1938 on the occasion of
his solo exhibition at the Galerie Pierre, and he became a friend of Paul
Eluard, Matta, and Yves Tanguy. In 1939, he began integrating figurative
elements into his work. This return to figuration was the hallmark of his
postwar paintings.
In the entry on his life and work pages 233/234 of the
New Spirit in Painting catalogue it reads :
However Hellion’s interest are not purely formal, his
simple but universal forms reflect the main theme of his paintings : scenes
form city life. Although Helion’s
intentions are not explicitly programmatic his figure paintings all
express a socially conscious attitude. It is of some significance therefore
that the transition from the ‘conceptual ’to the ‘popular’ coincided with the
period he spent in the harsh surroundings of a prisoner of war camp. The gulf between
social and formal concerns is bridged by Hélion’s attitude that art is a form of writing in which the
images are an equivalent of calligraphy and therefore have the power , like
words, to convey messages.
In 1988 Jed Perl, a critic in his mid-thirties who had
written for Vogue, Art in America, and The New Criterion, published his first
book: Paris Without End: On French Art Since World War I. It consisted of a
series of critical, historical and biographical essays on Matisse, Picasso,
Derain, Léger, Dufy, Braque, Giacometti, Balthus, and Hélion, assessing and
generally praising some key achievements, and also locating each man in the “liberating
largeness” of modernism’s first capital. He was interviewed by John Seed The Immoveable Feasts of French Modernism, Hyperallergic, September 2, 2014. Because that
book was re-published by Arcade Publishing in a 25th anniversary edition.
JS: If there is one artist in your book that really
needs to be seen again in the US would you say it is Hélion?
JP: Hélion has never been well understood in the US, although he lived
here for some years, had many friends here, and wrote his World War II memoir,
They Shall Not Have Me, in English and had an American publisher. Frankly, I
worry that America will never really understand Hélion. Not that he’s very well
understood in France, either. Hélion was both a formalist and a naturalist — he
invented his own, dazzling synthesis — but people don’t seem to accept it. The
problem, so I believe, is that he had no patience for all the twentieth
century’s fixed assumptions about abstraction and representation and how they
can and cannot be joined. There was an Hélion show at the National Academy in
New York not too many years ago, and it was not big enough or well selected
enough, and it received a viciously negative review from Roberta Smith in the
Times. But many great artists have been misunderstood at one time or another.
Hélion will endure. Two new publications promise to bring Hélion’s ideas to the
attention of a new generation of readers. Double Rhythm, edited by Deborah
Rosenthal, is the first book to collect the writings he produced about art in
English; and there is also a new edition of his war memoir.
This war memoir was published in the United States in
1943 under the title : They Shall Not Have Me.
The first part of the book, “Downfall,” opens with an
image of people fleeing through an abandoned landscape with hastily packed
wagons and cars. What follows is a day-by-day account of the disorderly rout of
the French army: scenes of exhaustion, fear, confusion, gridlock, and ugly
breakdown ending with Hélion’s capture on the nineteenth of June. The rest of
the book is organized into three parts: “Captivity,” which follows in detail
the forced march to his first Stalag in Orléans; “Forced Labor,” vivid
portraits of fellow prisoners and the substance of their shared daily
lives—hard labor, the misery of lice-infested quarters, efforts at resistance
both major and minor, despair and fantasy, and Nazi officers and German guards;
and lastly, “Escape,” a fast-paced and absorbing narrative beginning with his
walk out of the prison camp in Stettin under the cover of a fight staged by
other prisoners and ending with his crossing into the unoccupied Zone.
Additional details about the underground networks that aided Hélion in his
passage from Germany through Belgium and Paris to the border of occupied and
Vichy France could not be included in the original 1943 publication, but some
are provided in an afterword by Jacqueline Hélion in the present edition. For
example, readers learn that the American friend helping Hélion in Paris was
Mary Reynolds, bookbinder and long-time associate of Marcel Duchamp, and that
Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia also provided much needed assistance. The latter had,
in fact, played a crucial role in the Resistance through the Gloria SMH cell,
which was co-founded by Jeannine Gabrielle Picabia, her daughter with Francis
Picabia, and was also the cell to which Samuel Beckett belonged (James
Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury, 1996,
279–90).
Over the course of the four hundred-plus pages of the
book, Hélion’s account barely mentions this milieu of artists or earlier
disputes over abstract painting. There is also little explicit discussion of
politics, and no reference to his previous left-wing commitments. These are
understandable exclusions. The book was written under the auspices of the U.S.
Office of War Information, the state propaganda agency that employed notable
intellectuals and artists such as André Breton and Claude Lévi-Strauss in the
French-language version of its Voice of America radio program. Many details
about the prisoners’ squalid conditions, and the lack of not only food but the
widespread confiscation of their packages, would have served to counter German
claims that the prisoners lived in relative comfort, with plenty of leisure
time and food and clothing supplemented by the generous distribution of Red
Cross aid packages.
The book was widely read at the time of its original
publication in 1943 and became a sort of cult classic among painters. One
question that arises for today’s reader, though, would concern what insights it
provides into Hélion’s artistic evolution. Hélion only completed one painting—a
small 1942 watercolor of prisoners shaking lice out of a blanket—explicitly
dealing with his wartime experiences. In her introduction, Deborah Rosenthal
suggests that They Shall Not Have Me is akin to a “great unpainted composition”
of short stories, and that his postwar painting based itself upon the creation
of pictorial vignettes filled out not by the abstractions that he was still
creating in the 1930s but by fully realized human figures. This is a good way
of describing the structure of a large part of They Shall Have Not Me as well
as his postwar paintings of street scenes. Can it provide any insights into
Hélion’s abandonment of abstraction?
Painterly gestures are noticeable in the description
of a pair of shoes fashioned from found and stolen scraps of wood, leather, and
nails, reminiscent of a Cubist collage. Readers also find clues in the
anecdotes and portraits in “Forced Labor.” In a section on the makeshift
theater organized by his fellow prisoners aboard the S.S. Nordenham in Stettin,
he describes a prisoner dressed up in women’s clothes:
“Homely, with strong arms and powerful red hands, when
white had been smeared over his face, his lips barred with vermilion, a yellow
wig drawn over his curls, a bit of lace tied around his neck, and a rayon dress
pulled over his underwear, he made a surprising doll. His appearance was a
mixture of physical brutality and of indefinable gentleness. These hands could
have killed—they had—this mouth could have bitten cruelly, and yet this painted
face and this clumsy body were tender. When he stood, wordless, blushing under
the make-up, and looking far away beyond the small room, he expressed something
of us, of our conditions. . . . Perhaps this ridiculous figure was the real
image of our efforts to resist captivity, to feel, to love, to live the dream
behind which we hid from the ugliness of the day. “
Art for Hélion is in this image—garish, brilliant,
tender, crude, vulnerable—of struggle against the privations of “bare life.”
Details of theatrical and musical performances and classes on topics ranging
from automobile repair to literature, history, and philosophy also echo the
experience of other perhaps more well-known French prisoners of war. Fernand
Braudel wrote most of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age
of Philip II (1949) while in an Oflag (an officers’ prisoner-of-war camp).
Jean-Paul Sartre taught a course on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927),
and his play Bariona (1941) was also written for and performed by his fellow
prisoners (Alfred R. Desautels, “The Sartre of Stalag 12D (1940–1941)”; review
of Avec Sartre au Stalag 12D by Marius Perrin, The French Review 55 (1981):
201–6).
Occasionally, Hélion’s comments gently betray a sense
of where his own aesthetic preferences lay. He wrote, for example, that he
liked best the first improvised theatrical shows in the camp, which “seemed
like a poor calendar picture copied by a naïve amateur” but ended up nevertheless
sincere and touching. Another time, he lets loose a more critical, damning
verdict.
“At times, it all seemed so stupid, so primary, so far
from anything that I personally liked, that disgust fought my best intentions.
Instead of seeing, in the comedy being attempted on the stage, the expression
of the will of my men to buck up, I now saw an example of their mediocrity. All
their patience and ability had transformed the crude but expressive platform,
improvised on four stools, into a masterpiece of bad taste and pretensions,
with valueless ornaments invading the once healthy panels like an eczema. “
Facing a “similar decadence” in the classes he had
painstakingly organized, Hélion fights the impulse to tear it all down. But in
this upsurge of embittered exhaustion, there is nevertheless a glimpse of his
vision of what politics in the camp might be, or aspire to. It is oriented
toward the “strange collectivity of the captives” , which in its unity is
tenacious and enduring.
Hélion’s experience of the concrete as a camp inmate
consolidated an aesthetic trajectory that was already in motion. He says it
best in a short essay from 1943: “My share of the war has been sordid, yet
rich. I have come back, after three years, feeling hurt and muddy, from feet to
soul, yet strangely happy and alive. And my work has advanced one step that has
changed its appearance entirely. The war has not given me any new idea” (“How
War Has Made Me Paint,” Art News 43, no. 3 (1943): 17). We can make sense of
this by looking for the evidence of Hélion’s use, as he explains it, of abstraction
as the underlying structure of the figures that came to populate his postwar
paintings. He picks up sketching in 1943 where he left off in 1939 with studies
of a man’s head. A painting started in 1939, Au Cycliste, and its central
motifs reappear also. Hélion had already come to the conclusion that
abstraction was no longer adequate to the task of painting the concrete, even
though he had once conceived of it in precisely this way. The attempts of 1939
were always connected in some way, as he writes to Queneau, to the street: “sum
of all of us, source of raw material” (Lettres d’Amérique, 147; my
translation). He asked Queneau to keep these new directions in confidence until
he felt more assured, but by 1943 he could write in his Art News essay that it
was impossible for abstraction to express his “violent passion for life, as a
whole, as it was denied to me, the streets, the people, the things.” A vivid
portrait of a concrete life-world of suffering, They Shall Not Have Me is a
stylistic testimony to this rejection of abstraction, one that eluded adequate
representation in painting.
Jean Hélion, le peintre du Stalag. Par
Pierre Benetti. En Attendant Nadeau , April 24, 2018.
In October 2014 Double Rhythm:
Writings About Painting, with essays
by Hélion, edited by Deborah
Rosenthal, was published by ArcadePublishing
Hélion seeks to embrace all of art, from Raphael to Mondrian, within one
ongoing investigation into form. His approach may be foreign to readers today
who view painting as a continual recharging of conventions of technique or
concept. But reading his descriptions of the movements of contours and colors
in a Poussin painting, and how one’s eye repeatedly trips upon the unexpected
while never retracing any one path, one senses the brilliant originality of the
work, and how it transcends mere mastery of style, technique, and narrative.
Hélion’s writing transcribes to words a visual journey: “progressions” and
“counter-progressions” accelerate the movements of color, turning mere “agitations”
into “potentialities.” Shapes are in themselves concepts, not the reflections
of them. Representational art is, finally, not a system of illusions, but a
forging of the optically intelligible. He describes, in short, a language of
painting that communicates as only painting can, through optical experiences.
“I cannot read nature; it is not written.” So Hélion imagines the
predicament of standing before a harbor scene once painted by Seurat. “To open
eyes in front of a wharf, sea, sky, boat, mast and to let in whatever comes
within their range, is not seeing. It is pouring into a bottomless bag.”
Truly seeing, on the other hand “is perceiving intelligibly, in an order
allowing the faculties to seize elements, place them, make their existence possible
inside.” And Hélion marvels at the way Seurat achieves this in his painting
“The Channel at Gravelines” (1890), in MoMA’s collection: “It makes me live
entirely through sight. It is organized as a radio-set for waves. Its
organization is not mine but compatible with mine. It is intelligible…”
Hélion is relating something beyond styles and contexts: what it means
to see. And he goes on to describe a painting’s “double rhythm”: the
relationship of self-contained elements within the overall composition, and
then the internal movements, in turn, within each of these elements.
His emphasis on the primal forces of painting and the artist’s
improvisational engagement with them — “The created form becomes creative” —
suggests the free-form give-and-take of Abstract Expressionism. But whereas
Ab-Ex looked to enveloping sensations, declarative gestures, and the
materiality of paint, Hélion’s impulses never stray from a discipline of
ordering, gathering, and elaborating.
In addition to images of the works he discusses, Double Rhythm includes
more than a dozen reproductions of Hélion’s own paintings. Unfortunately, the
images are all in black and white, eliminating his rigor of color. They vividly
show, however, his evolution from abstraction to stylized figuration. The often
peculiar, abstracted interpretations of human figures from the late ’40s will
not appeal to every viewer. The remarkable vigor of his more naturalistic still
lifes and studio scenes from after 1950 may not be evident to others. But for
even these readers, his writings will communicate the authentic passions of a
painter who strove to see deeply, in regards to both nature and traditions of
painting.
Hélion’s output in print, just as on canvas, challenges us. How prepared
are we to countenance the fact that all painting is artifice? His writings, as
much as his paintings, reflect a complete faith in both the artifice and the
separate reality of painting. His course of action becomes almost involuntary.
A drawing’s structure, he writes, strikes him like an “external event”:
It rouses in me the passion to inhabit it; I can feel it become my
portrait, that portrait of the self I could be, all instincts out like limbs,
working my thoughts like the wheels of a semi-organic machinery.
Hélion
was an original, an artist who pursued the language of painting through a
singular blend of logic and feeling. The pages of Double Rhythm vividly relate
the struggle in another medium, the language of words.
The Writings of a Passionate Painter. By John Goodrich. Hyperallergic ,
January 16, 2015.
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