Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/169626
Jean Hélion 1904 - 1987 Perroquet au miroir, 1975 Signed, dated and dedicated Gouache and charcoal on paper 25 ½ x 19 ¾ in, 65 x 50 cm Provenance Private Collection, Paris In 1921 Hélion moved to Paris, where he formed friendships with numerous Surrealist poets and artists, including Duchamp, Ernst and Tzara. He moved to New York in 1936 when his work underwent a radical change as he moved from abstraction to figuration. He returned to Paris in 1946 to find himself and his work rejected by many of his old friends, although he gained acceptance from Eluard, Tanguy and Miró for the Surrealist symbolism they saw in his new work. Hélion used the still life format to capture the mystery of disparate objects. This work, a study for the oil painting Le perroquet et ses échos ('Coat-tree and echoes') from 1975, is filled with Surrealist motifs, including the coat, hats, shoes and umbrellas. The umbrella, in particular, was a significant object for Helion: "I love the object [the umbrella]…I like its petticoats pressed tightly on to the stick, the fat handle, the fine tip, the chapel it forms above the people it shelters". Within Surrealism, everyday objects became symbols of the modern world and sexuality. Hélion discussed the sexual language of these seemingly unrelated objects: "Without my being hypnotized solely by the sexual language and reality of objects, I find it a very revealing aspect of their existence". Miró, too, employed Surrealist symbols in works such as Still Life with Old Shoe (1937), which features everyday items, including a shoe, torn newspaper, a fork and a loaf of bread. These are surrounded by shadows which can be read as silhouettes. Similarly, in Hélion's study, the objects and old clothes hung on the coat-stand produce the vertical outline of a figure. The coat-stand and its figurative shadow reappear in many of Hélion's works from this period, including Perroquet bleu (1975). Whilst Hélion introduced representational techniques into his work from 1943 onwards, Miró developed his language of symbols into increasingly abstract and simplified forms, as featured in the painting he created for his artist-friend, Homage to Hélion (1976).