Jean Hélion

Jean Hélion was born in 1904 in Couterne, Orne, France. Before World War II, he was considered one of the masters of abstract art ,which for him was the "idiom of clarity."

Hélion lived in the U.S. for four years, then returned to France at the beginning of World War II. He was held as a prisoner of war in Germany from 1940 to 1942, escaped in 1942 and fled back to the U.S. Then he abandoned pure abstraction and became a painter of everyday life.  

In 1946, he returned to Paris, where he eliminated all vestiges of abstraction.