Video: We visited the Jean Hélion exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris
Figuration or abstraction? The painter Jean Hélion decided not to choose… Or rather to choose against the grain of his peers. A misunderstood genius, we are told. The Museum of Modern Art in Paris retraces this anachronistic life in 150 masterpieces, highlighting color, frank, vibrant, contrasting. What strikes us here is that Jean Hélion seems to be moving backwards. He, who was a pioneer of abstraction across the Atlantic in the 1930s, changed course at the dawn of the Second World War and returned to figuration when criticism turned away from it. It doesn’t matter, the artist doesn’t care about trends. Hélion now revisits the greatest classics of painting: the nude, the still life, the allegory. From a symbolic figuration, Hélion gradually slides towards an increasingly simplified, even fragmented figuration: a piece of roof, plowed earth, a market stall... Jean Hélion shatters his truth in pieces of the life of the more trivial, until this final work, a macabre still life entitled Family Portrait.
