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Lot Essay
Dating from the height of his engagement with non-representational painting, Bande verte exemplifies Jean Hélion’s distinctive form of abstraction. At this time, Hélion was a key figure of the international avant-garde, his friends and acquaintances including a wide variety of artists, from Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson to Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder and Marcel Duchamp. Traveling between Paris and his newly established studio near his wife’s family in Rockbridge Baths, Virginia, this was a period of artistic exploration for Hélion as he continued to question and expand the possibilities of abstract painting.
Hélion’s mode of abstraction was born out of the prevailing artistic factions that formed the basis of the avant-garde in 1920s Europe. Seeking to challenge the hegemony of Surrealism at this time, towards the end of the decade an increasing number of artists turned to non-representational painting, embracing objectivity in the face of the deeply personal language that their Surrealist contemporaries revered. This mounting interest in post-cubist, non-figurative painting was inspired particularly by the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. In 1930, Hélion—together with the De Stijl artist and theorist, Theo van Doesburg—organized a new group called Art Concret, in which they pursued a program derived from the latter’s rigorous form of Neo-Plasticism. Named editor of the group’s magazine, Hélion emerged as a leading voice for abstraction. The following year, he and Van Doesburg co-founded the Abstraction-Création movement along with artists including Albert Gleizes, Auguste Herbin, František Kupka and Georges Vantongerloo. Their shared beliefs were, as the first editorial statement published in the periodical Cahier of 1932 stated, “non-figuration, that’s to say a purely plastic culture which excludes every element of explication, anecdote, literature, naturalism…” (“Abstraction-Création” in Cahier, no. 1, 1932; quoted in C. Harrison and P. Wood, Art in Theory, 1900-1990, Oxford, 1997, p. 357).
Hélion’s painting flourished in this like-minded milieu. In his series of the early 1930s, his work embodied non-representation. In 1934, however, Hélion resigned from the group, opposed to the stringent rules enforced by Herbin. Pursuing a looser form of abstract painting, his work was increasingly removed from the rigid austerity of form and color dictated by the group, to instead embrace a greater sense of movement and vitality, ultimately resulting in the re-integration of nature itself into his painting. As Bande verte demonstrates, Hélion employed a combination of geometric and biomorphic forms in the composition, suggestive of floating shapes amid expansive planes of bold color. “My painting is in motion,” Hélion wrote in 1935. “Now I try to think simply and to allow to grow on the initial structures another structure, emotional, unconscious… Oppositions develop. The colors become more refined, the space becomes more flexible, but the further I go, the more the call of nature becomes evident. The space is temporarily, miraculously, filled with light, but the volumes will have to become complete; objects, bodies. Inevitably… we shall pass on to a new naturalist era” (A. Moeglin-Delcroix, ed., Jean Hélion: Journal d’un peintre: Carnets, 1929-1984, Paris, 1992, vol. 1, pp. 55-56).
At the time that he painted Bande verte, Hélion was spending an increasing amount of time in the United States—indeed, as the present work demonstrates, he had begun the canvas in Paris and completed it in Virginia a few months later. His work was shown in galleries across the country throughout this period, including The Valentine Gallery, New York, and the Putzel Gallery, Los Angeles, where the present work was featured in an exhibition of 1937.
Hélion’s mode of abstraction was born out of the prevailing artistic factions that formed the basis of the avant-garde in 1920s Europe. Seeking to challenge the hegemony of Surrealism at this time, towards the end of the decade an increasing number of artists turned to non-representational painting, embracing objectivity in the face of the deeply personal language that their Surrealist contemporaries revered. This mounting interest in post-cubist, non-figurative painting was inspired particularly by the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. In 1930, Hélion—together with the De Stijl artist and theorist, Theo van Doesburg—organized a new group called Art Concret, in which they pursued a program derived from the latter’s rigorous form of Neo-Plasticism. Named editor of the group’s magazine, Hélion emerged as a leading voice for abstraction. The following year, he and Van Doesburg co-founded the Abstraction-Création movement along with artists including Albert Gleizes, Auguste Herbin, František Kupka and Georges Vantongerloo. Their shared beliefs were, as the first editorial statement published in the periodical Cahier of 1932 stated, “non-figuration, that’s to say a purely plastic culture which excludes every element of explication, anecdote, literature, naturalism…” (“Abstraction-Création” in Cahier, no. 1, 1932; quoted in C. Harrison and P. Wood, Art in Theory, 1900-1990, Oxford, 1997, p. 357).
Hélion’s painting flourished in this like-minded milieu. In his series of the early 1930s, his work embodied non-representation. In 1934, however, Hélion resigned from the group, opposed to the stringent rules enforced by Herbin. Pursuing a looser form of abstract painting, his work was increasingly removed from the rigid austerity of form and color dictated by the group, to instead embrace a greater sense of movement and vitality, ultimately resulting in the re-integration of nature itself into his painting. As Bande verte demonstrates, Hélion employed a combination of geometric and biomorphic forms in the composition, suggestive of floating shapes amid expansive planes of bold color. “My painting is in motion,” Hélion wrote in 1935. “Now I try to think simply and to allow to grow on the initial structures another structure, emotional, unconscious… Oppositions develop. The colors become more refined, the space becomes more flexible, but the further I go, the more the call of nature becomes evident. The space is temporarily, miraculously, filled with light, but the volumes will have to become complete; objects, bodies. Inevitably… we shall pass on to a new naturalist era” (A. Moeglin-Delcroix, ed., Jean Hélion: Journal d’un peintre: Carnets, 1929-1984, Paris, 1992, vol. 1, pp. 55-56).
At the time that he painted Bande verte, Hélion was spending an increasing amount of time in the United States—indeed, as the present work demonstrates, he had begun the canvas in Paris and completed it in Virginia a few months later. His work was shown in galleries across the country throughout this period, including The Valentine Gallery, New York, and the Putzel Gallery, Los Angeles, where the present work was featured in an exhibition of 1937.