Paris Without End

On French Art Since World War I

Jed Perl

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781628724042
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Teoria e critica dell'arte

This brilliant blend of history, biography, and criticism explores the seminal figures of twentieth-century French art—Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Léger, Dufy, Braque, Giacometti, Balthus, and Hélion—and the vital art world in which they thrived.The ten interlocking essays in this important book include radical new evaluations of Derain, Léger, and Dufy, and penetrating studies of the final works of Picasso and Braque. Paris Without End, Jed Perl's first book, is now celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary and is essential reading for anyone passionate about modern art.Roberta Smith called it "a quiet, cogent tour de force.... As one critic's demonstration of what he considers the best in art and the best way to write about it, this book sets a high standard."Hilton Kramer also noted, "Everyone who cares about the art of the twentieth century will find something to disagree with in this book—its many unorthodox judgments are bound to be controversial—but that, in my view, is a mark of the book's importance."

HÉLION

The Last Judgment of Things

Jean Hélion is the only artist since Léger who has made poetry out of that most shadowy of presences in modern art, the common man. This artist who was born in Normandy in 1904 and died in Paris in 1987 invented types who are much more than the statistics of social realism; characteristic types, with the mysterious aura of Le Nain’s peasants and the housekeepers of Chardin. Hélion and Léger, born a generation apart, are connected by friendship, by Hélion’s many borrowings from the older artist, and above all else by the liberality of spirit with which they’ve approached the bewildering spectacle of Modern Times. In his passionate curiosity about the look and feel of a man-made world, Hélion also recalls such seventeenth-century Dutchmen as Jan Steen and Gerard Ter Borch. Indeed, Hélion ultimately goes much further than Léger in the direction of naturalistic representation—and I sometimes wonder if Léger’s rumpled workmen of the beginning of the fifties weren’t inspired at least in part by the equally rumpled men that Hélion had started painting a little earlier.

Everything in Hélion comes in quantity: cycles of paintings, accompanied, ever since his first brilliant abstractions of the thirties, by an outpouring of preparatory drawings. After World War II, when he became fully himself, there were the series of female nudes—almost Courbetesque, with their weary, beautiful flesh; of men reading newspapers on park benches—the papers unfurled like floating banners; and of bedraggled poets reclining in the gutter before mannequin-filled shop windows. The forms are bold, simply modelled, and there are often clear, heavy outlines running all around the shapes. With Hélion it’s the artist’s feeling for pure form—for the punch of a red or a blue, for the twisting route of a black contour—that propels so many anonymous figures into throbbing life.

Hélion himself came through the packed decades as one of the wisest and most generous-hearted of all the adventurers of modern art. Even as I write these pages, the testimonies of his gift for friendship and of his infectious enthusiasm multiply at every turn. The catalogue of a recent exhibit at the Albemarle Gallery in London contains an open letter to Hélion from Myfanwy (Evans) Piper, a figure in the English avant-garde. She recalls how more than fifty years ago she’d first come to Hélion’s studio in Paris. “It was August: the life of the city was suspended in heat and emptiness, everyone had gone away except you and other artists who couldn’t afford to—Mondrian, Brancusi, Kandinsky, Domela, Giacometti among them, all of whom I subsequently, through your introduction, visited.” She continues: “Jean—your eloquence and sparkle both in French and in English (luckily for me) left me spellbound. So we got on. I remember staying, that first day, an unconscionable time . . . and walking back through the unfamiliar dark streets in a state of high exhilaration.”

As it happened, the catalogue containing this letter was brought to me from Paris by a painter friend who’d just, on her first trip to Paris, visited Hélion. (She must have been among his last American visitors.) And my friend’s story of her visit with Hélion and his wife Jacqueline seemed to have an open-sesame dimension much like that of Myfanwy Piper’s visit all those years ago. Of course Hélion could no longer offer a young artist introductions to that list of artists—he’d outlived them all; but the shining enthusiasm that put everything in the realm of the possible, this was present to the very end, in the blue eyes, the rapid speech, the art-filled atelier. My friend described the call to Hélion’s apartment, and Jacqueline answering, “Come over today at five.” Then the apartment building near the Luxembourg Gardens; the uncertain climb up the odd little flight of stairs to the penthouse; then the terrace with its magnificent gray and white and coffee-colored vista of Parisian rooftops. And one’s immediate exclamation, “But that’s the roofscape Hélion has painted!” The beautiful rooms with their oddly sloping ceilings. The exclamation over a white tureen on a sideboard that one knows from the paintings, and this starting off the presentation by Hélion and his wife of a parade of paintings, a cascade of half a century’s work. My friend’s answering, “Brooklyn,” to Hélion’s question, “Where do you live?” elicits the story of Mondrian’s funeral in a Brooklyn cemetery. And on and on. And after a few hours and the good-byes, my friend is, like Myfanwy Piper all those years ago, “walking back through the unfamiliar dark streets in a state of high exhilaration.”

Jean Hélion himself came to Paris to apprentice to an architect in 1921, when he was seventeen. Six years later he met the great Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres-García, whose work made a personal synthesis of Neoplasticism and folk art motifs. It was through Torres-García that Hélion first came into contact with the avant-garde and got to know Mondrian, van Doesburg, Kandinsky, and the other abstract artists who were in Paris at the time. He embraced the cause of abstract art, which was then almost twenty years old, and became involved in the groups and magazines that were proselytizing for abstraction. From the start Hélion had an ability to put himself right in the middle of the fray, and this characterized his entire career and made for a life dazzling in its connections and rich in its friendships. In 1930, along with van Doesburg, he founded the Abstraction-Création group, which published a magazine, organized exhibits, and included among its members Arp and Robert Delaunay. The many interviews Hélion gave in recent years provide an invaluable view of the Paris of the early thirties. Hélion’s generosity of spirit casts a beautiful glow over all the immortal names—he recaptures a sense of a shared experience that’s rarely found in the history books.

Kandinsky used to invite everybody to sumptuous tea parties, which were presided over by Nina Kandinsky. Mondrian always sat at one end of the table, and at the other sat the youngest and most unknown of the group, myself. On my right was Arp, on my left Magnelli, and so on. One day Mme Kandinsky said to Mondrian, “What’s the matter, Mondrian, are you not well?” He replied, “No, not particularly. I perceive a tree, right behind Hélion. It would have been better if you had let me sit beside him.” Mondrian was such a puritan, at least verbally, that he simply couldn’t bear the liberty of a tree. I had a great respect for him and liked him very much, but I must say that he was incapable of including a tree in his field of comprehension. Kandinsky, by contrast, was already liberated enough to do trees. Not that he talked about depicting them, but when he showed his paintings he would remark very proudly, “There are the colors of nature.” After a trip along the Jordan River he told us that he had “captured the colors of those beautiful landscapes, those beautiful deserts.” In sum, we all formed a perfect microcosm, with some advocating the most absolute rigor and others the greatest possible freedom. Though we apparently went in different directions, actually, as befits artists, we tried to grasp every aspect of the truth, from one extreme to the other.

Like Giacometti, Hélion went to school with the Parisian avant-garde of the early thirties, created his first mature work with a vocabulary borrowed from older artists, and only later, at the end of the decade, embarked on a return to reality—his “different direction.”

There is to Hélion’s art and career in the thirties an international cast. Abstraction-Création, though formed in Paris, reflected the idealism of nonfigurative art as it had evolved in Holland, Germany, Russia; and Hélion’s travels during the period—to Russia, where he met Tatlin, and to Berlin, where he met Naum Gabo—reflected a transnational brotherhood of abstract art. Hélion also visited America, for the first time in 1932, long before World War II brought many Parisian artists to the States. Unlike so many Frenchmen, he learned English perfectly. He assisted Albert Gallatin in putting together his great collection of abstract art (which became the Gallery of Living Art at New York University), befriended the young American painters, and encouraged the formation of the American Abstract Artists group. Much of this long-submerged history of abstract art in the thirties has floated to the surface in recent years, and Hélion’s name now has a certain currency in America among those who read scholarly articles and exhibition catalogues. Indeed, his abstract period has by now been gone over so often that it comes as something of a shock to realize that he painted abstractly for little more than a decade. But however Hélion chose to paint in later years, he always bore the stamp of the thirties, with its fervent hopes and hard realities.

Hélion’s compositions of the mid-thirties, in which the geometry of the Abstraction-Création group engages with a Surrealism that “breaks down barriers and causes unexpected constellations of images to flower,” are an essential landmark of the art of the time. It’s the convergence of abstract idealism and Surrealist fluidity that makes for the haunted period flavor of these works. They’re impersonal, muffled, expectant, somberly beautiful. Hélion’s cylinder, helmet, and bullet-shapes, modelled in rich, pearly tones (Clement Greenberg once called the color Vermeerish), look to have been surprised into space. In the beautiful 1935 abstraction in the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, Standing Figure, the colored planes wrap around one another into a torso and head with the powerful heroic anonymity of a Cycladic idol. This is a silver-toned, porcelain-hard version of Léger’s brash style of the disks of 1918. The smooth surfaces keep being disturbed by queer conflicting forces.

The writer Pierre Brugière, who met Hélion at Arp’s house, recalls seeing hanging above Hélion’s worktable in 1934 reproductions of Poussin and Fouquet—and that bow to the tradition of French art, amid the idealism of abstraction, suggests Hélion’s reservations about the self-sufficiency of abstract art. When Hélion, in 1934, resigned from Abstraction-Création, it was “Because of Vantongerloo’s austerity—he was a real ­purist—and also because of Herbin. They were both very much anti-Surrealist. As far as I was concerned, Surrealism was also a brand of freedom, so abstraction could not be opposed to it.” In 1933, on a page of a notebook that contains a line drawing of a hand, he had written: “The superiority of nature is that it offers the maximum of complex relationships.” In 1934, in Cahiers d’Art, he was explaining that abstraction and representation are in some way commensurate, equally real.

Still, it wasn’t until 1939 that Hélion was painting representational paintings—a series of men’s heads topped off with fedoras. Given how figural Hélion’s abstractions had recently become, this return to reality wasn’t exactly a surprise; and yet I don’t think one can offer any simple explanation for Hélion’s divorce from abstraction. Dissatisfactions and anomalies build up—but what ultimately tips the balance is really impossible to say. This is how Hélion recently described his development in the later thirties:

I had gone to America in 1936, partly because of the American relations I had through my wife, partly to get away from the environment in which I had come to abstraction. I settled in New York to regain my freedom, but it so happened that my reputation as an abstract painter began to attract those very artists to me who, after years of representational painting, felt tempted by abstraction and the freedom it implied. So I withdrew to Virginia, to go my own way. I turned to nature, which they were escaping from; we met going in opposite directions.

Surely it’s significant that the first figures aren’t so much portraits of individuals as portraits of social types. The men are defined more by their headgear than by their faces—they’re symbols of a new lower-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 softness, no flesh.

In 1939, Hélion 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, 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 Hélion 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, automatism, and the first stirrings of what was shortly to emerge as Abstract Expressionism. Though Hélion 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 Hélion did before he was drafted in 1940 and went back to fight with the French. The war interrupted his work for four years. Hélion was taken prisoner in June 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 Hélion published, after his return to America in 1943, a memoir called They Shall Not Have Me, which is, in its concreteness of naturalistic 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, Hélion had written risqué stories in order to make some money (they’re now lost). In They Shall Not Have Me he reveals a considerable literary gift. He doesn’t write as the ­artist—his life among the intelligentsia is cast aside—we scarcely know anything about the narrator except that he’s a soldier, left directionless and leaderless in June 1941. “I was not sent to war,” he begins.

It came to me in Mézières en Drouais, a charming village west of Paris, where, for months, I had crawled upon the hills, ducked under blank shots, dug model trenches, and absorbed soporific chapters from the infantry sergeant handbooks very peacefully. . . . We expected to leave for the front, and were eager to fight; but our train never came. . . . On the eve of the thirteenth, a lieutenant of my platoon, of whom I was very fond, took me aside and told me that the Germans were hardly twenty miles away, advancing rapidly after breaking the main line of resistance. The order had come at last that all troops should evacuate.

On the very same day, June 13, Alberto Giacometti and his brother, Diego, were setting out from Paris by bicycle, to try to make it to Bordeaux, and a boat for America. For the Giacomettis, who were Swiss citizens, the days of flight ended with a return to Paris. Alberto ended up spending the war years in Geneva. But for Hélion and his fellow troops the days of rout ended in capture, and a week-long forced march during which many men fell by the wayside of wounds or starvation. After this, They Shall Not Have Me turns to an extended series of scenes from the two years of Hélion’s life in prison.

After spending several months in a prison camp in France, Hélion is sent to work on a Pomeranian farm on the ­Polish border. The couple of chapters about this experience has the focused intensity of a classic of prison literature. Along with a small group of workers, he spends a brutal fall and ­winter—painting outhouses, digging for potatoes, working at a threshing machine. At first, the accommodations don’t look so bad.

To have a room for eight, with a few square inches of shelf for each was a forgotten delicacy [after the months in prison]. There was a window with a view of a large field and a forest beyond. As a playground, we had a ten yards’ stretch between the tool shelter and the privy. The latter looked like a sentry box, and from each of the three holes inside, one could view the farm and the castle through the cracks.

Everything is a struggle. “We spent much time fitting our footwear, stuffing openings with crumpled newspaper and patches of burlap, and tying string all around. When the shoes were large enough, a layer of straw inside gave fine protection.” The garbage is studied meticulously. “We found our greatest treasure in a garbage can: a map of all Germany and the northern part of Switzerland, a Shell road map.”

It’s hard to say whose lot is worse—that of the prisoners or that of the peasants, who’ve been there forever. These Pomeranian chapters are interesting not only as an account of the war years, but also as a picture of life forty years ago in the backwoods of Europe. The farm is owned by a baroness, who runs a sort of ancient feudal establishment.

When the weather was clear, the Baroness and her younger daughter came after lunch, in a coach driven by an old crow: he was assistant Wachmann, carried a pistol; and showed it to us, once in a while. He jumped to the ground, lowered the collapsible steps, and the Baroness descended. Wearing high riding boots, she went around, said a few words to Tapageur, who bowed to her from the top of his horse; to The Ox, who blushed and stammered; and, here and there, to the peasants. The daughter, seventeen or eighteen, her long hair flying handsomely in the wind, borrowed somebody’s hoe, and dug a few potatoes, neatly, as if she knew how. She just stooped, of course, and lifted the potatoes one by one, with the hoe, built a little heap, handed back the tool and said with a smile: “Here you are.”

The peasant answered respectfully, “Danke schön, Gnädiges Fräulein” as if she did not mind hurrying to make up for the ten minutes lost.

Hélion plots an escape; but before he has a chance, he’s transferred to a banana boat, in the harbor of Stettin-on-Oder, where seven hundred and fifty men are kept, most of whom work at jobs in the town during the days. Here, due to his skill at languages and his general ability to take charge (an ability that had already stood him in good stead back in the ­Abstraction-Création days), Hélion becomes an assistant in the Commandant’s Office, a sort of middleman between the prisoners and their captors. This part of the book is perhaps less gripping—life begins to take on a slower, more orderly day-by-day pace. But there are many marvelous vignettes, and Hélion’s affection for people—his sense of how liveliness bursts forth in all sorts of circumstances—shines through. He describes getting together entertainment for the inmates.

There was a tall boy who once had a bay window. He was a cabinet maker, specializing in luxurious coffins. It had borne little influence on his mentality. He was good humored and full of indomitable vitality. Gifted for clowning, he imitated the best music ha...