Jean Hélion. La prose du monde

The Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris is staging a retrospective exhibition of the work of Jean Hélion (1904-1987), a painter and intellectual whose work spans the 20th century. Jean Hélion was one of the pioneers of abstraction, which he introduced to America in the 1930s, before moving towards personal figuration at the dawn of the Second World War. He returned to France after the war, and in the 1960s was hailed by the new generation of Figuration Narrative painters such as Gilles Aillaud and Eduardo Arroyo. During his lifetime, Jean Hélion had numerous exhibitions in French and international galleries and institutions, such as the MAM in 1977 and 1984-85, with his most recent retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2004. Despite its importance and singularity, his work remains little known to the public. Organised chronologically, the exhibition Jean Hélion, La prose du monde brings together over 150 works (103 paintings, 50 drawings, notebooks and a wealth of documentation), rarely shown to the public, from major French and international institutions as well as numerous private collections.