.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Painted in 1937-1938, Jean Hélion’s Figure volante dates from a critical period in the artist’s career during which he was moving from abstraction to figuration. Hélion had begun experimenting with non-representational art in 1929, inspired by Piet Mondrian and the De Stijl movement. It was this same year that Hélion, together with Theo van Doesburg, founded the artistic group, Art Concret, which, two years later expanded to become known as Abstraction-Création. Together with Auguste Herbin and Georges Vantongerloo, this expansive association also included Jean Arp, Albert Gleizes, František Kupka, Ben Nicholson, Wassily Kandinsky and many others. The aim of Abstraction-Création was to expound the artistic possibilities of non-representational art, purposely counteracting the Surrealists’ emphasis on figuration. By the middle of the 1930s, this group numbered more than four hundred members, each dedicated to pure abstraction.
By this time, however, Hélion had begun to move away from the rigidity and austerity of form that defined his earlier work, and instead embrace a softer, more amorphous type of abstraction. He crafted his own distinct artistic vocabulary, which was characterized by dramatically rounded forms and variations in color to create volumetric objects in space. Gradually this biomorphic language began to coalesce into recognizable, figurative forms. According to Hélion, “Mondrian, whom I always admired but could not agree with, based his expressions on a reduction of means and the elimination of particularized representation. He used to say to me, ‘We are not of the same tradition—you are a Naturalist.’ Even as early as 1935 he ‘accused’ me of belonging to the French naturalist tradition” (quoted in “Eleven Europeans in America” in The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, New York, 1946, vol. XIII, nos. 4-5, p. 29). In Figure volante, two figures, composed of geometric elements, are shown, one in the foreground, and a smaller one behind, floating amid a flat plane of dark turquoise. This exploration into pictorial scale defines Hélion’s work of this time. From the Second World War onwards, Hélion fully embraced figuration, leaving behind all traces of abstraction to paint from nature once more.
Throughout the 1930s, Hélion made a number of visits to America, during which he helped introduce European Modernism to American audiences. In 1936, the year before he began the present work, he relocated to New York, moving between the city and Rockbridge Baths, Virginia, where he also had a studio. Hélion was credited with influencing the work of Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and other Abstract Expressionist artists through his painting. On the occasion of Hélion’s fourth New York exhibition in 1940, the critic Meyer Schapiro described him as “the outstanding abstract painter of the younger generation of American and European artists. Painters here follow his work as the most advanced and masterly of its kind” (quoted in Jean Hélion, exh. cat., National Academy Museum, New York, 2005, p. 47).
By this time, however, Hélion had begun to move away from the rigidity and austerity of form that defined his earlier work, and instead embrace a softer, more amorphous type of abstraction. He crafted his own distinct artistic vocabulary, which was characterized by dramatically rounded forms and variations in color to create volumetric objects in space. Gradually this biomorphic language began to coalesce into recognizable, figurative forms. According to Hélion, “Mondrian, whom I always admired but could not agree with, based his expressions on a reduction of means and the elimination of particularized representation. He used to say to me, ‘We are not of the same tradition—you are a Naturalist.’ Even as early as 1935 he ‘accused’ me of belonging to the French naturalist tradition” (quoted in “Eleven Europeans in America” in The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, New York, 1946, vol. XIII, nos. 4-5, p. 29). In Figure volante, two figures, composed of geometric elements, are shown, one in the foreground, and a smaller one behind, floating amid a flat plane of dark turquoise. This exploration into pictorial scale defines Hélion’s work of this time. From the Second World War onwards, Hélion fully embraced figuration, leaving behind all traces of abstraction to paint from nature once more.
Throughout the 1930s, Hélion made a number of visits to America, during which he helped introduce European Modernism to American audiences. In 1936, the year before he began the present work, he relocated to New York, moving between the city and Rockbridge Baths, Virginia, where he also had a studio. Hélion was credited with influencing the work of Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and other Abstract Expressionist artists through his painting. On the occasion of Hélion’s fourth New York exhibition in 1940, the critic Meyer Schapiro described him as “the outstanding abstract painter of the younger generation of American and European artists. Painters here follow his work as the most advanced and masterly of its kind” (quoted in Jean Hélion, exh. cat., National Academy Museum, New York, 2005, p. 47).