Jean Hélion, born Jean Bichier, contributed to make known Abstraction in United-States. In 1920, Jean Hélion stops his chemistry studies and settles in Paris to become architecture drawer. He discovers painting during his numerous visits to Louvre Museum, and he decides he wants to be painter. He realises his first paintings in 1922, mainly portraits and landscapes. He discovers artworks of Derain, Matisse and Cézanne. His first paintings are in a very geometrical trend. The young painter goes rapidly though Abstraction, in order to favour rhythm and movement in his compositions.

In 1925, the art collector Georges Bines bought a first painting of Hélion. With this success, Hélion decides to study drawing at the Adler Academy. In 1926, Hélion discovers Cubism and Modern painting. In 1928, he participates to Salon of Independents and frequents Montparnasse artistic circle.

From his still life paintings, Hélion develops a sign language that gives birth to his first abstract paintings. Hélion continues his researches on Abstraction and exhibits in 1928 his first abstract paintings at the Gallery Dalmau in Barcelona.

Jean Hélion forms, with Theo van Doesburg, Otto Carlsund and Léon Tutundjian the revue Art Concrete, which rapidly becomes an artistic group. This artistic group recommends an “art entirely conceived and formed by mind before its execution that should not receive anything from nature”.

The Art Concrete adventure goes on in an expanded group, which becomes in 1929 the Abstraction-Creation Group, and is rapidly joined by Arp, Delaunay, Gleizes and Valmier. Jean Hélion met Charchoune, Mondrian, and later Léger, Calder, Ernst, Tzara and Duchamp.

In 1932, Hélion settles in New York and the Abstraction-Creation Group organises his first exhibition in New York. However, Jean Hélion rapidly detaches himself from the Group and prefers continues his creation independently. He definitively leaves the Group in 1934 and returns to Paris. He succeed to create a vocabulary that allows to define life and world: “Never an ideal seems greater to me: invent world as it really is”. His elements in paintings gradually become figures. He continues his pictorials and aesthetics researches, making more complex chromatics relations between figures and accentuating anthropomorphic characters.

From 1934 to 1935, Hélion travels a lot in Europe, including London and Swiss. He met Kandinsky and Hartung. In Paris, Hélion settles his studio Boulevard Saint Jacques and starts to paint tall formats. In 1936, Hélion participates to many collective exhibitions in Paris, London and Oxford. This year, he met the surrealist André Breton.

At the end of the 1930’s, we can notice an emergence of news forms in his compositions, and Hélion starts to underlines all his figures contours.The years 1939 definitively marks his separation from Abstraction. His last abstract compositions are Dramatic Composition and Falling Figure, which illustrate the fall of Abstraction inside him. His first large-scale figurative canvas is with Cyclist (1939).

In 1942, Hélion returns to United-States and met Calder, Ernst, Léger and Mondrian. In 1945, Hélion also met Peggy Guggenheim’s daughter, Pegeen, and married her. The couple settled in Paris. In 1947, Hélion realises a major work, A rebours (Wrong Way up), one of several compositions in which a female nude is represented upside down. This painting summaries all his researches since Abstraction. This painting also annunciates two major themes: personage of Daily Scenes and Upside down Nude.  

In 1948, Hélion realises his first series of Daily and Still life paintings with Pumpkins, them recurrent in many of his paintings. In 1949, Hélion paints a lot of nude, almost unique figure.

In the early 1950s, Hélion starts to create life painting. He pursues real until an advanced naturalism. He enters in Extreme-Figuration. He integrates in his compositions daily life scenes and usual objects in his still-life paintings. The reality of his new manner to paint excludes him from Parisian artistic scene, dedicated to Abstraction. But Hélion doesn’t renounces to Figuration and continues to paint liberally, favouring in the early 1960s the colour more than details.

In 1965, he participates to Paris Biennale, and the National Centre or Contemporary Art organises an itinerant exhibition. In 1970, the Grand Palais dedicated to him a retrospective.

In the late 1960s, Hélion suffers from blindness and endures a double cataract operation. This event strongly influenced his painting and he integrates blind people with a white walking stick in his compositions.

In these years, Hélion principally paints street scenes: café terraces, stands, markets, streets orchestras. Sketches are made in the street and he paints in his studio.

In 1979-1980, the National Museum of Modern Art organises an itinerant exhibition dedicated to his drawings. A great retrospective is organised in three cities: Beijing, Shanghai and Nanchang.

In the 1980s, his vision declines and he sees with just one eye. However, he works unabated and paints tall formats, as to practice his weak vision to colour and to not loose entirely his painter talents.

Jean Hélion always showed in his creation his youthful spirit through colours vivacity and rhythm of his compositions. The painter always was in rupture his pictorials movement of the time, especially when he humanized his Abstraction. His painting presents an undeniable mnemonic character: paintings double, patterns are insistent and themes obsessive. In his creation, the passage between Abstraction and Figuration is this capital moment that exceeds one of the most beautiful paintings of Contemporary Art.