Artist Birthday: Jean Hélion

Jean Hélion was a member of a number of artists’ groups between World Wars I and II which advocated for total, non-objective abstraction. Ironically, after World War II he lost his tenacity for geometric abstraction and focused more on figurative compositions, some incorporating dream-like imagery.

Artist birthday for 21 April: Jean Hélion (1904–1987, France)

Jean Hélion was an important leader in the evolution of European non-objective abstraction after World War I.

Jean Hélion, Composition, 1936. Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (MOMA-P2101hlars)

Together with Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), De Stijl's leading theorist, Hélion became a founding member in 1930 of Art Concret (succeeded the following year by Abstraction-Création), an artistic collective with an austere approach to abstraction. While many of his canvases of the late 1920s and early 1930s clearly relate to works by van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) whom he met in 1932, Composition demonstrates Hélion’s breakthrough to a more independent style. The painting features a carefully balanced arrangement of flat and curved modular forms rendered with machine-like precision, which appear alternately static and free-floating.

After the devastation of World War I (1914–1918) in Europe, some artists lost their enthusiasm for new experimentation. Cultural movements turned away from the vigorous avant-garde tendencies of pre-war Paris toward the values of the classical tradition. This tendency towards classicism in art in the 1920s  was a desire for stability after the upheavals of war. Despite this trend, official taste became less hostile toward modernism, and artists were able to consolidate and build upon the experimentation of the pre-war period.  Artists were still drawn from all over Europe to Paris, assuring its status as the capital of the art world in the West.

Abstraction-Création was an association of abstract artists set up in Paris in 1931 with the aim of promoting abstract art through group exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were Auguste Herbin (1882–1960) and one of the founders of Dutch Constructivism (De Stijl) Georges Vantongerloo (1886-1965). The movement embraced all forms of abstraction in order to encourage modernism's continual growth, although the group tended to gravitate towards geometric abstractions such as Concrete Art, Constructivism and Neo-Plasticism. The group held regular exhibitions until 1936.

Jean Hélion was born in Normandy. In 1921 he moved to Paris where he initially studied chemistry and architecture, working an apprenticeship in an architecture office. In 1925 he determined that he wanted to be a painter, and he was immediately drawn to abstraction and the avant-garde artists' circles in Paris. Hélion felt that painting should correspond to the mechanical and industrial world, and he was therefore initially drawn to Piet Mondrian's (1872-1944) and Theo van Doesburg's Neo-Plasticism, which reduced paintings to rectangular shapes in primary colors, separated by black lines. He was also initially drawn to Constructivism, and painted in a personal Neo-Plasticist style from 1925 to 1932. He became a member of the artists' group Art Concret (Concrete Art) which advocated for geometric abstraction. He also became part of the group Abstraction-Création which advocated for all types of free-form abstraction. By 1935 his mature style evolved into hard edge, machine-like forms.

In 1932 Hélion made his first visit to New York, which he perceived as the most modern industrial city he had ever seen. On subsequent visits his abstractions had an impact on the small community of American artists devoted to abstraction, and on a visit in 1936 Hélion encouraged them to form the group American Abstract Artists. On his final visit to New York in 1944, his abstract works made a great impression on the future Abstract Expressionists who respected his self-confidence in totally abstract art as the only path for a painter to follow.