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PARTISAN REVIEW
middle-class man who prefers ready-to-wear suits (in which he can
pass as a character from a Hollywood movie) to the traditional getup
of the tradesman or craftsman or laborer. The hard clarity of the
men in their hats is mixed with the fullness of form we know from
the abstractions. The heads are blocky, angular; they have no soft–
ness, no flesh.
In 1939, Helion wrote to his friend the poet Raymond
Queneau from his home in Rockbridge Baths, Virginia, of a new
series of watercolors. "The most beautiful," he said, "represents a
street of Paris, always of Paris, my native city, a characteristic place,
typically atypical, for which I nourish a growing passion." The one
large painting from 1939 is of the street: a severe gray facade, a
cyclist, a man with an umbrella, a woman at a window. The figures
don't really fill the space; it's a bit depopulated in feeling, not quite
the image of the love of the street Helion would later give us. But
certainly it represents everything for which international abstraction
couldn't account. Geometry was an idea that had, in any event,
begun to dissolve in the astringent waters of Surrealism, automa–
tism, and the first stirrings of what was shortly to emerge as Abstract
Expressionism . Though Helion came to reality in America, it was a
coming home to France as well- to the streets of Paris, and to the
Poussin and Fouquet on the studio wall.
The Cyclist
was the last large painting Helion did before he was
drafted in 1940 and went back to fight with the French. The war in–
terrupted his work for four years. Helion was taken prisoner inJune
of 1940, spent two years as a prisoner in German hands, escaped,
and made his way back to the United States. All this would be
neither here nor there in regard to the paintings if it weren't that
Helion published, after his return to America in 1943, a memoir
called
They Shall Not Have Me,
which is, in its concreteness of natural–
istic detail and immediacy of image, not what one would expect from
a polemicist for abstraction, a star of the international avant-garde
of the previous decade. It's a book about life among the people, the
product of the same sensibility that was turning toward the life of the
street in 1939.
They Shall Not Have Me
details the day-to-day struggle
to exist .
In the early thirties, at the suggestion of his friend Georges
Simenon, Helion had written risque stories in order to make some
money (they're now lost). In
They Shall Not Have Me
he reveals a con–
siderable literary gift. He doesn't write as
the artist-his
life among
the intelligentsia is cast aside - we scarcely know anything about the
