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PARTISAN REVIEW
To yearn for Carpaccio, Masaccio, Velazquez and at the same time
to "break off all relations with nostalgia": this became Helion's ex–
traordinary program. The work he did from the mid-fifties to the
mid-sixties (which remains his least known both here and in Europe)
was a long preparation for this final conquest, a search for "that
distance which allows liberty without depriving it of its force."
The two great triptychs of
1967-1969-
Triptyque du Dragon
and
The Events of
May,
each something like ten by thirty feet - are
monumental and reflect an encyclopedic view of the world. Helion
obviously wants to invent complete figure compositions, composi–
tions in which the various effects of glass and flesh and fabric and
metal are given their individual weight. And in a sense this urge is
antimodern, a return to the ideals of the Renaissance. Helion is in–
dicating what he might have done had he been born closer in time to
Delacroix or Rubens. But of course he wasn't born then, so this
turns out to be a contemporary grand manner-sketchlike, im–
promptu. The faces and limbs of dozens of figures are just suggested
with bunches of strokes. Helion's let's-try-it spirit recalls Manet and
his premier modern style, with its rapid-fire jotting down of impres–
sions.
The blue-green
Triptyque du Dragon
(1967)
is a hymn to the
streets - and when you're in Paris, where so many streets still com–
pose into views as artful as Helion's painting, you know why he was
drawn to the subject. This enormous painting was actually designed
to be exhibited at the Galerie du Dragon on the rue du Dragon in the
Sixth Arrondissement, and in photographs of the original installa–
tion one can see that Helion's panorama of street life was visible
from the street, through the gallery's windows. Art and life inter–
mingle. Along the rue du Dragon, full of interesting shops and gal–
leries and publishing houses, Helion found a cross section of the
population of the city (a cyclist, a lady with a baguette, a waiter, a
pair oflovers, a worker descending into a manhole), and this became
the raw material for the exposition of two themes. One theme is
Helion's affection for the simplest acts - the drinking of a cup of cof–
fee in a cafe, the carrying home of a loaf of bread - and his belief that
these are the only rituals that we have left to perform. A second
theme is the now-this-way-now-that-way course of the artist's own
career, which is documented in the shop windows in the painting. At
the center of the composition, in a gallery display, are two of
Helion's canvases - an abstraction of the thirties, and a head with a
fedora from
1939.
The shop to the right of the gallery, with its man-
