Paris, France — Artist, writer, escaped prisoner of war, the 20th century French artist Jean Hélion trained as a pharmacist and chemist before turning to the world of art professionally. He was a pillar of the abstract movement in Paris in the 1930s before taking a sudden turn into the figurative as World War II was dawning. The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (The Modern Art Museum of Paris) is devoting a retrospective to this singular artist. The exhibition, entitled La prose du monde (The Prose of the World) brings together 150 works including 103 paintings, 50 drawings, his notebooks and extensive archive material. He lived on both sides of the Atlantic and was known as an artist and art expert but his works have only rarely been presented to the public at large.

He began his famous carnets or notebooks in 1929, a personal reflection on painting that he would maintain until 1984. He would move to the United States in 1934 where he became friends with Marcel Duchamp, another celebrated French artist who had moved to New York. And when he returned to France in 1940 to take part in the war with the French army, his life would take an incredible turn. He was made a prisoner of war but escaped from his captors and would write the best seller They Shall Not Have Me which was only recently translated into French.

Upon his return to Paris in 1946, he re-invented his own version of the figurative and progressively Paris and its street scenes would be a bottomless source of inspiration for his works and his « prose of the world ». He would progressively lose his vision starting in the 1970s. The show brilliantly brings together all of the aspects of his work from the perfect abstract works to the figurative in which the whimsical often appears, of note a trio of spider crabs and a sort of still life which juxtaposes a pumpkin with an umbrella with other everyday objects which emerge like hidden pictures in a childhood game. The exhibition is running until August 18th. Guided visits, conferences and workshops are all on the agenda. ©Trish Valicenti for The Gourmet Gazette. Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, 11 Avenue du Président Wilson 75116 Paris, France. Tel: + 33 (0)1 53 67 40 00 http://www.mam.paris.fr