Backing Jean H\'8elion: Why Did Roberta Smith Attack the Painter?

It had not been my intention to return to the subject of the Jean Hélion exhibition at the National Academy Museum any time soon, but after reading Roberta Smithâ??s lengthy and altogether malicious attack on the artist in The New York Times of Aug. 5, I believe a rebuttal is needed. Jean Hélion (1904-1987) was a painter of considerable accomplishment and a man of great personal courage, and Ms. Smithâ??s exercise in defamation should not be left to stand unchallenged.Her indictment of Hélion is remarkably crude and often muddled. It alleges that as a painter Hélion was nothing but â??a brilliant spongeâ?â??â??one whose command of brush, composition and color enabled him to lift his synthesis of other artistsâ?? ideas above humdrum derivativeness.â? The â??brilliant spongeâ? is also charged with the crime of â??sexismâ?: Hélion was married more timesâ??four in allâ??than Ms. Smith believes to be permissible. Even when she grudgingly praises his artistic command, she couples that praise with disapproval of the painterâ??s marital history, as in this ditzy passage:

â??He had an uncanny sense of when a style had served its purpose and, as with his four wives, never ended one relationship before he had started another. As a result, this exhibition proceeds with an almost uninterrupted fluidity, despite its shifting commitments.â?

There are, indeed, a number of times in Ms. Smithâ??s review when she experiences some difficulty in determining whether sheâ??s praising Hélion or maligning him, so she provides the reader with a commentary that lends itself to diverse readings.

What her irresponsible review completely omits is any reference to the crucial experience that changed Hélionâ??s life and, as a consequence of that life experience, led him to change his outlook on art. Hélion had been living and painting in France since 1925. He took up residence in New York in 1936, but in 1940 he returned to Europe to join the French Army. He was captured by the Nazis and held as a prisoner of war, but somehow managed to escape. He told his story in a book called They Shall Not Have Me (1943). It was his experience as a P.O.W. that precipitated the crisis that changed not only Hélionâ??s life but his art as well.

After surviving Nazi capture, Hélion no longer felt that an art devoted to abstraction accurately represented his beliefs. The ordinary affairs of civilian life were now more precious to him than the purist painting of abstract forms. This was certainly a loss for the history of abstract painting, for Hélion had been in the vanguard of the movement, serving as a vital link between European and American modernists.

It tells us a great deal about Roberta Smithâ??s critical priorities that in her long and often condescending review of the Hélion exhibition, she has overlooked (or forgotten?) the central moral crisis of the artistâ??s life. Clearly, neither the war nor Hélionâ??s particular experience of it are of the slightest interest to herâ??which, for a critic attempting to elucidate the change of heart that led to Hélionâ??s rejection of abstraction, is fairly disabling.

For a quite different view of Hélionâ??s pictorial achievement, consider the following passage from Jed Perlâ??s book, Paris Without End (1988):

â??Jean Hélion is the only artist since Leger who has made poetry out of that most shadowy of presences in modern art, the common man. This artist â?¦ invented types who are much more than the statistics of social realism; characteristic types, with the mysterious aura of Le Nainâ??s peasants and the housekeepers of Chardin. Hélion and Leger, born a generation apart, are connected by friendship, by Hélionâ??s many borrowings from the older artist, and above all else by the liberality of spirit with which theyâ??ve approached the bewildering spectacle of Modern Times.â?

The Jean Hélion exhibition remains on view at the National Academy Museum, 1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, through Oct. 9.