Jean Helion Crown Art Lib

The titles of the four introductory essays display the many aspects of this modern French artist--Helion: The Art of Declaration; Helion: The World As Prose; Helion and British Art, 1933-1937; and Jean Helion's American Connections. The careers of most artists whose art displayed such different aspects and such breadth, as well as changes in genres and subjects, would be described as "checkered" or "interesting." But Helion is not simply categorized as this. Despite such heterogeneity over the decades of his work from the 1920s to the 1980s, Helion manifestly surpasses such labelings. For the abstract works with a constructivist accent thru the still lifes and figures of his latter decades, Helion's work evidences a consistent boldness; not only in coloration, but also composition and assorted inner forms. About 125 pages of color pictures of paintings divided into mostly subject and a couple of stylistic categories illustrate this notable modern painter's range of subjects and movement regarding styles. The chronology of more than 20 pages of smaller type with many photographic insets is virtually a compendious biography of Helion. The five-page bibliography of the same smaller type contains hundreds of entries. In short, this work is the present major publication on Jean Helion; and with its high quality of production and design and its encompassing content, will probably stand for a long time as the major introduction and reference on Helion.