ABSTRACT
Jean Helion abandoned abstraction and turned eventually to the idiosyncratic realism of his style–reason enough, apparently, for Mr. Seuphor to consign even Helion's earlier oeuvre to oblivion. The exhibition of nineteen of Mr. Helion's paintings from the years 1929-39 at the Willard Gallery is, under the circumstances, a salutary reminder of just how good a painter he then was. The irony is that personal eloquence was the last quality an abstract painter of Mr. Helion's persuasion was then seeking. Mr. Helion himself proved to be one of the very few native Frenchmen who grasped what was involved, artistically, in the theory and practice of these revolutionary foreign talents, and he responded not only with enthusiasm but with an exemplary intelligence and tact. The need for the absolute may have been tremendous, but in Mr. Helion's case it was tempered by a sensibility that transformed the absolute into a more sociable and manageable utterance.
