Jean Hélion & André Masson
“In 1984, I discovered Jean Hélion’s paintings, perhaps through a magazine called Eighty Magazine, although I’m not sure, I remember corresponding with Karl Flinker*. I was a young, self-taught painter’s apprentice who had started out a year earlier. I don’t remember what prompted me to write, but I wrote my first text devoted to an artist, and I later learned that it was the last on his work that Jean Hélion read before his death in 1987. One night in October, from the 27th to the 28th to be precise, I had a sort of premonitory dream about Hélion and Masson, and what a surprise it was the next day when I learned of their simultaneous disappearance during the same night. Shortly afterwards, Nicolas Hélion asked me to work with him, and I had many works by both artists in my hands.” Hervé Bize
The gallery is pleased to announce a singular and exceptional exhibition, the idea of which has been in the making for a very long time, and which the current “institutional” focus on these two major 20th-century artists, Jean Hélion (1904-1987) and André Masson (1896-1987), has made obvious.
Indeed, it is astonishing that two of France’s most important museums, the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris and the Centre Pompidou-Metz, should simultaneously program two retrospectives, Hélion in Paris and Masson in Metz.**
The gallery was a pioneer, perhaps worth remembering as 2024 marks its 35th anniversary of its activities, precisely since the early 1990s, one of the few contemporary art galleries to regularly include historical artists in its program, in order to resituate historical artists in its program, thus resituating and anchoring its constant focus on contemporary artists.
We couldn’t associate ourselves with this museum event by proposing to bring together Hélion and Masson, whose works, which have lived through the conflicts and major upheavals of the last century, share obvious affinities, even if, at first glance, they seem relatively far apart – although Hélion sometimes “flirted” with Surrealism, so to speak – not only because their approaches took part in different avant-gardes or movements, only to detach themselves from them, but also and above all because of the influence they both exerted abroad, particularly in the United States.
The group of works we are bringing together especially for this occasion – paintings and works on paper – extends chronologically from the chronologically from the 1920s to the late 1970s.
This exhibition brings full circle a journey begun by Hervé Bize in order to promote the dissemination of art in Eastern France – and beyond – as early as 1986, in other words, just before these two exceptional artists passed away.
* Karl Flinker (1923-1991) was Jean Hélion’s dealer in Paris from 1974.
** Jean Hélion at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, March 22 – August 18 and André Masson at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, March 28 – September 2.