Visit of the exhibition “Jean Hélion, La prose du monde”

Guided tour of Jean Hélion’s exhibition, The Prose of the World
Tour in French by Sophie Krebs (curator of the exhibition)

The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is offering a retrospective exhibition of the work of Jean Hélion (1904 – 1987), a painter and intellectual whose work spans the twentieth century: Jean Hélion was one of the pioneers of abstraction, which he introduced to America in the 1930s, before evolving towards personal figuration at the dawn of the Second World War. Returning to France after the war and hailed in the 1960s by the new generation of painters of Narrative Figuration such as Gilles Aillaud or Eduardo Arroyo, Jean Hélion will benefit during his lifetime from numerous exhibitions in galleries and French and international institutions such as that of the MAM in 1977 and 1984-85, the last retrospective having been presented at the Centre Pompidou in 2004.

Despite its importance and singularity, his work is still little known to the public today. Organized chronologically, the exhibition Jean Hélion, La prose du monde brings together more than 150 works (103 paintings, 50 drawings, notebooks and abundant documentation), rarely presented to the public, from major French and international institutions as well as numerous private collections.

RSVP required – 2 tickets per person maximum

Jean Hélion, The Man with the Red Cheek, 1943, Oil on canvas, 65 x 49.5 cm, Private collection Claudine Hélion–Altmann, Paris ADAGP, Paris ©, 2024