Artists

Jean Hélion

Press release

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.

He returned to France after the War and was hailed in the 1960s by the new generation of Narrative Figuration painters, among them Gilles Aillaud and Eduardo Arroyo. His career was marked by numerous exhibitions in French and international galleries and museums, including MAM in 1977 and 1984–85, with the most recent retrospective held at the Centre Pompidou in 2004. Despite its sweep and its singularity, his oeuvre remains little known.

Chronologically presented, The Prose of the World brings
together over 150 rarely shown works – 103 paintings, 50 drawings, notebooks and a mass of documentary material – from major French and international museums and many private collections.