Jean Hélion
The Prose of the World (from 22 March to 18 August 2024)

The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is presenting a retrospective of the painter and intellectual Jean Hélion (1904–1987), whose oeuvre spans the whole of the 20th century. Hélion was one of the pioneers of abstraction, which he brought to America in the 1930s before moving on to a personal form of figuration just prior to the Second World War.

And in 1939, just when abstraction was beginning to dominate the international scene, his intuition led him increasingly towards figuration and “the real”.

Alerted to the fragility of things by the outbreak of the Second World War, he set about applying his abstract language to a reconstruction of the image, the result being everyday street scenes stripped of all sentimentality.

Paris, street life and minglings of dream elements proved an inexhaustible source for his “prose of the world”.

Hélion was sensitive to profound changes in the social and political world and changed his abstract style of painting accordingly to figurative street scenes in NY and Paris.

“I believe artworks should rouse viewers, wake them up, stir them, interest them, amuse them, give them pleasure, joy, while always being internal. In this matter as in others, I reject the contradiction between spiritual and material.”

Come join us in this impressive exhibition!