Peter had the demeanour of a dishevelled, rather droll, down-to-earth ouvrier, in a blue cotton ‘French worker’s’ jacket. He habitually had a pipe, which he mostly seemed to be in the process of filling, rather than actually smoking. He had Romano-Gallic good looks, with heavy bags under the eyes, a shock of grey hair, and a deep voice and distinctive laugh that came from low in his chest. He directed my interview with great authority, for all his apparent informality. I had brought a large painting of a figure playing bagpipes (based on a 17th-century Dutch sculpture in the V&A museum, where the Royal College was also housed at the time). The painting led to a discussion of the French painter Jean Hélion, whose work indeed interested me a lot, and of the Chilean painter Roberto Matta, whom I had met briefly when I was an undergraduate at the Central School of Art. These were the right sort of references for Peter, and I was in.

Once I started at the RCA though, we didn’t really get on. He wasn’t comfortable with the small, rather cryptic and skeptical paintings I was mostly making. My interests in artists also turned out to include not just solid men of the Left and the Résistance like Hélion, but dubious types like Picabia, or like André Derain who Peter said ‘should have been shot’. (Derain had submitted to an obligatory artists’ tour of Germany during the Occupation.) Peter’s politics seemed very black-and-white. He was massively informed about political affairs across the world, and with him it was basically ‘which side are you on?’ Nuance and complexity he swept aside as weakness, and simply conversing with him could be difficult as a result. My natural equivocation exasperated him. At one point he asked – as if it might explain, if not excuse, my general ambivalence and perverse interests – if I was ‘some kind of Catholic’. I said no, I was an atheist from a Protestant background. He shrugged and walked away.

At the RCA in the early ’80s Peter liked to insist that the age of art ‘stars’ was over. He was thinking of the celebrities of Pop and abstract art that the college had produced in the ’60s (David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Bridget Riley); and one sensed he was glad to think that such notoriety for artists was a thing of the past. But of course, even as he spoke, Goldsmiths College in London (where he had been a former principal) was fomenting the YBA phenomenon, a yet more rampant and market-enmeshed star system. The Royal College at this period was – to its credit perhaps – no route to fame, and certain students of my generation jumped ship in search of a smarter career path. Peter did have favorite students whose careers he promoted, but this tended to mean landing them in good teaching jobs rather than in hot galleries. I think I had been earmarked as a likely golden boy, but now I wasn’t playing the game. He liked to use his influence generously, and he was infuriated when I went to Paris and sought out Hélion without first seeking an introduction from him, Peter. He exploded when I didn’t want to apply for a certain post-RCA opportunity he thought would suit me.

Nevertheless a few years after I had left the Royal College he learned that I had work in an exhibition in Paris and could not afford to go out for the opening. A check arrived in the post for the fare and a hotel, with a note saying this was a gift not a loan, and that he wanted to hear no mention of it again. I was hugely grateful, and went to Paris. Later on he asked ‘Did you get that money I sent you to go to Paris?’ which amused me in the light of his stipulating that he wanted to hear nothing of it. But I thanked him then, profusely.

After that we would meet up periodically in central London. He favored a continental-style bistro called Pélican, in St Martin’s Lane, despite his disapproving of nostalgia for an “Americanized” cliché of continental cafe society – something of which he accused his one-time comrade Kitaj. I was in contact with Kitaj, and Peter would say “Don’t mention that you’ve seen me – he’ll pump you for information!” Kitaj had included Peter in his “School of London” notion in the ‘70s, and in the associated Human Clay exhibition. The two men had since become estranged, I gathered, though Kitaj always spoke warmly of him. Peter could clash with allies as much as opponents. I once went to see him with the painter and writer Tim Hyman, closer to him personally than I was, also in terms of artistic “style,” and probably ideology. Peter got so irascible as the afternoon wore on that we eventually had to flee in disarray. But people tended to forgive Peter. He was a charmer as well as a tyrant, and very attractive. He addressed everyone as “my love,” and though it was often intoned with irritation, it did signify a basically benign intent. I think he had quite a few romantic relationships, and the impression was that when they ended it was without rancor.

At Pélican I would always have a Kir, a drink to which Peter introduced me, explaining it was named after a mayor of Dijon who created the drink when the German army had commandeered all red wine in the area. Peter would have Burgundy. I don’t think the symbolism of our differing dilutions of red was ever commented on, but he seemed to have accepted what he must have thought my rather bloodless socialism. He was great talking about European film, and literature. I was trying to catch up on some classics of French and Italian cinema and on non-Anglophone poetry. The painters I knew in more depth and I think it gave him pleasure to talk to someone of my generation who actually cared about post-war figures he felt close to and who were little known in the UK. Sometimes I would come with my then partner, a figurative sculptor whose work he liked. Again he was delighted that she was interested in artists like Zadkine or Laurens (he corrected our pronunciation – the S is sounded), or Ipoustéguy whom he especially supported.

With the exception of Philip Guston, he didn’t have much time for the New York School and its descendants. He seemed basically opposed to America – again politically, first of all, and then by extension culturally. “You actually like New York?”he’d ask, skeptically. I once made the mistake of saying I’d been quite impressed with Julian Schnabel’s film about the persecuted gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. Peter erupted with disapproval. He was vetoing the film, and it was clear that what was unconscionable to him was the implied criticism of Cuba, especially by a director who probably personified the worst of American capitalism. Any possible inherent virtues of the film, or real injustices of the Cuban régime, could simply not be entertained. I was on safer ground when the conversation turned to the Tate Gallery’s acquisition of a group of work by the long-neglected French social realist André Fougeron, including a huge anti-American propaganda painting.

The Tate finally acquired a group of Peter’s work also, and hung a room of it, clearly bringing some satisfaction, for all his professed indifference and grumbles at how long they took to pay him. In 1983 he had had a retrospective at the Camden Arts Centre in London, and then periodically there were shows in more or less alternative venues (one at Wimbledon School of Art I remember), and sometimes with commercial galleries. From the ‘80s onwards he had been mostly drawing. His earlier paintings on canvas had always been very graphic, like his major piece The Bombing of Sakiet (1959), a big canvas indicting French actions during the Algerian war of independence. For years this work — which is now on long loan to the Tate — had slightly mythic status, locked in storage in the Tunisian Embassy in London. The jagged, narrative charcoals Peter came to concentrate on were – and are – widely admired for their poignancy and expressive energy. They sometimes have mythological motifs, sometimes historical ones. I recall him in his studio bringing out one sheet with a tremulous tenderness that evidently reflected his feeling for the subject itself – the death in prison camp of Robert Desnos. At other times his drawings are more poetically unspecific – an old man with a flower, a woman with a bird. Peter didn’t have a gallery at that time, and conflicts had often scuppered relationships with dealers. The inherent contradictions of functioning as an anti-capitalist artist in a capitalist system of course make for great tensions. In recent years, however, James Hyman Gallery has been representing his work and facilitating a reconsideration of his achievement.

When Peter got older and more infirm I visited him more at his house, in a handsome terrace hidden behind Elephant and Castle in south London. The studio was on the ground floor, and I was only allowed in there once, fleetingly. He lived mostly in the basement, where the kitchen and bathroom opened off the study/living room and were admirably old fashioned in their plumbing and appliances. The place teemed with books, letters, journals and papers. A typewriter was lodged in the middle of everything, from which issued his roughly typed and much-corrected letters. He would talk of his current correspondences, conferences and campaigns with Left-wing organizations all over the world. It felt like an international operations room. I sensed he had many contacts like myself, making periodic visitations.

In his last years he could no longer go down annually to his house in rural France, which was a great sadness to him. On one of my visits I brought a bottle of rough red from roughly the right area. As we drank he examined the label amusedly and declared that the wine was “probably made in Norwich,” emitting his inimitable, chesty, machine-gun laugh.

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‘They’re so cold, these scholars! May lightening strike their food so that their mouths learn how to eat fire!’ This was the epigraph (from Nietzsche) to Picabia’s first collection of poems in 1917. George Baker’s The Artwork Caught by the Tail seems to promise, at last, some truly fired up scholarship. ‘Art history has never looked like this before’ gasps the blurb on the metallic gold dustwrapper. ‘But then again, Dada has never looked like art history.’

This identification of the text with its topic (a scholarship finally suited to its subject) is continually reiterated through the book. In a paradox that is only appropriate to Dada’s contrarianism and (self-)negation, we learn in the introduction that ‘…the best, if not the only way to introduce a book on Dada is to open with a statement of that which the book will not be. And so: This will not be a book on Dada’. Yet, through ‘a strategy that art history has not yet been able to envision’ the study will ‘remake its own art historical form in the guise of the Dada work it brings to light’. Apropos the exclamations of ‘Voila!’ and ‘Ici!’ with which Picabia announced Dada in a 1915 issue of 291magazine, Baker proclaims, ‘And so it began with a voila. And so too does this book.’ (His first and subsequent chapters then recurrently open with the words ‘Here is an image of Picabia’.)

Throughout the text it is pointed out how previous art historians (not named) have failed to think outside the box in the way Dada surely requires. They have overlooked significant works, facts, episodes or revealing conjunctions, failed to understand whole aspects of Picabia and Dada. But this is perhaps inevitable, the implication is, given the willed elusiveness and contrariness of the man and the movement. His 1922 exhibition at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona, for example, has been ‘largely forgotten’, featuring works that have ‘never received their due…hardly received even the beginnings of an interpretation…destined to be forgotten’. It has been ‘relagated to the trash heap of modernist art history, exiled from any of its central accounts, a lonely footnote to the dissolution of the Dada movement…’ And Baker wonders if Picabia’s trip to Barcelona to mount a major show in (supposedly) an obscure venue, ‘didn’t slip out of the history books precisely because it cannot be read’. He elaborates:

I think it means – let me venture this at least – that the whole endeavor was particularly, intimately attached to Dada, to its own brand of inscrutability. It means that the Barcelona show was deeply representative of what Dada means (for me), part and parcel of a movement that was never more powerful that when it was in full flight [Baker means retreat, presumably, not élan] or when it was devolving into absolute disintegration. Dada was a complete success in just those moments when it could only be judged a total failure. When it missed its target. When it self imploded. To proclaim its death was, then, to do its work. It was to reveal Dada’s work as a form of death, of non-work, of what I have called “unworking” and dissolution. (p.214)

Understandably, then, conventional art history has quite missed the point. It has accepted the apparent marginality of certain critical events or images, settled for accepted evaluations, familiar assumptions about what Dada (and perhaps modernism in general) is – about which its major figures are and what their works mean. By contrast, Baker warns us, he will be ‘rupturing the monograph structure perhaps definitively’, producing an ‘anti-monograph’ that in the true spirit of its subject will reimagine its material, offer ‘counter-intuitive writhings’ and a ‘heated conversation’, adopting a ‘methodology of the between’, discovering a dialogue among media and artists, a wrenching and reconfiguring of fundamental symbolic terms. It will forge a critique that might both mediate between and get beyond previous dead-locked models (broadly Freudian and Marxist) for thinking about modernism and the Avant-Garde.

Wow. Any reader weary of post-structuralist pieties, or of old-fashioned canonical narratives, might surely seek refreshment here. Artists themselves might even be moved to read the book. One has already plugged it in Art Forum as a personal favorite; and a peer endorsement on the back cover calls Baker ‘one of the few art historians capable of writing for artists, making artists the primary beneficiaries of their thinking, and also’ (just to be clear) ‘writing for the purpose of inciting new artistic production.’

In fact, truth to tell, the experience of reading The Artwork Caught by the Tail is very similar to that afforded by much recent institutional scholarship. Bataille, Lacan, Marx, Freud, Saussure and Benjamin are the key thinkers invoked. Derrida, Deleuze & Guattari, Foucault, Barthes, Baudrillard and Jameson are heavily referenced. October-associated authorities such as Krauss, Bois and Buchloh are all on hand. Meanwhile the rhetorical tone reminds one of T. J. Clark, among others, in its tendency, despite – or rather by – parading high intellectual seriousness, shamelessly to glamorize its subject, and by association its own intellectual project.:

A marginal period, a marginal figure, a blind spot for art history: It is the argument of this book that from this half-forgotten, not-yet-congealed historical moment can emerge a rereading of the terms of Dada, a revision of its central practices. More: From this nebulous blind-spot, from the margins and the borderlands of the interregnum, a reversal can be achieved, a shifting of Picabia from the margins of modernism to its center, as well as a revision of the actions and the progressions of the avant-garde in general and of its supposedly central formal or critical paradigms. (p.10)

Of course to recognize that all this drama belongs (pace protestations) very much within the arena of academia is not to dismiss the book. Academics are as real an audience as any other group – say artists (many of whose practices are anyway now closely associated with academic theory), or ‘general readers’. It is a skewed logic that would seriously suggest Dada art needs a Dada kind of art history, any more than Impressionist art would require impressionist art history. Picabia himself would have no time for this book, but that hardly condemns it.

What Baker really offers, perfectly reasonably, is high-end, post-modern theorising, with just a touch of unconventionality in honour of his subject’s way-outness. The book’s only real eccentricity comes in the form of a sixty-page epilogue – an apparently loose, but no doubt carefully crafted, ‘conversation’ between various voices. Phrases and ideas from (among many others) Picabia himself, Tzara, Joyce and Beckett, plus various theorists and writers drawn on earlier in the book, are interwoven with speculative authorial (or anonymous, disembodied) remarks and questions. Broadly it seems intended to reiterate the themes and issues in a way that better suggests the principles of dialogue and ‘the between’ essential to Baker’s notion of Picabian Dada. It reads a little like dictaphone ruminations the  author might have made while deep in the process of redrafting his text. Some may find it engaging, others (as Baker acknowledges) embarrassing.

But what new insights and propositions do we really get from this book? Bringing Picabia from the margins to the center of art historical discussion is in itself hardly an issue: he has long been a canonical figure for his Dada work and early abstract painting, and the reputation of his later career is now firmly revived too. (For a truly overdue reassessment art historians might turn to his neglected colleague Serge Charchoune, who showed remarkable abstractions at the Dalmau Gallery in 1916 and 1917, who conceived of an abstract form of ‘painting-film’, who contributed mechanomorphic drawings to 391, whose vast body of experimental poetry, prose and aphorisms, mostly in Russian, remain unknown and whose long career yielded some of the most individual painting of the twentieth century. His diagrammatic ‘portrait’ of Picabia and his especially conspicuous contrubution to the latter’s key painting L’oeil cacodylate appear in this book but go unmentioned. Even a reimagined art history of the marginal has its blind spots and its unquestioned priorities.)

The real substance of this book, though, accrues around two or three main ideas. One is to do with medium specificity, a second to do with symbolic economies and exchange (borrowing from the thought of Jean-Joseph Goux); and a third (welcome) notion is – put very crudely – that Picabia should be seen as less of a nihilistic anti-artist than he often has been; that he found, through and beyond Dada’s rupturing and refusal of meaning, a new space for affirmation and signification, indeed for joy and love.

Regarding medium specifity, Baker discusses the output of Picabia (and his collaborators/colleagues, primarily here Duchamp, Man Ray , Erik Satie and René Clair) under category headings. ‘Dada Painting’, ‘Dada Drawing’, ‘Dada Photography’ and ‘Dada Cinema’ each get a chapter. It is not clear why other ‘disciplines’ such as ‘Dada Poetry’, ‘Dada Event’ or ‘Dada Publishing’ do not feature, but the important intention seems to be to resist usual assumptions that Dada implies the mere dissolution of art forms and genres (a dissolution typified in the readymade taken as a proclamation that ‘from today, medium is dead’), or that Dada can be in any simple or inevitable way defined against a modernist mainstream that fetishized ‘pure’ form. A complex idea of medium specificity has been on the agenda for a while in Rosalind Krauss’s writing, and clearly for Baker the insistence on individual media (and then their interplay) is intricately bound up with other concerns including Picabia’s short-circuiting of symbolic economies and his surprise ‘happy ending’. Yet the impression (on initial reads admittedly) is that the medium categorizations are not in fact deeply structural in this book. Baker’s close and clever – sometimes preposterously strained – readings of many key works do not seem to significantly rely on or emerge from his media divisions.

It might be relevant simply to note here, though, that Picabia, for all his extra-curricula dilettantism, was undeniably a painter making paintings, as evident in the current show Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia at the Tate in London. Here the feebleness of Man Ray’s late noodlings and the progressive dilution of Duchamp’s efforts (or, in the case of Etant Donnés, his dreary silliness) are in sad contrast to the energy and self-renewal of Picabia’s painting, culminating in the impasto and spot pictures. His power, and indeed his liberation, is achieved through – while of course not guaranteed by – full engagement with an art form. His colleagues’ apparently greater openness ends in lassitude and insignificance. Picabia might be similarly a ‘real’ poet – a practitioner in the specific medium of poetry – judging from the new, densely annotated translations by Marc Lowenthal. But Lowenthal’s volume alone is not sufficient to demonstrate that. Without the French in parallel one is at a loss to really appreciate and evaluate Picabia’s radically disjointed verse. Indeed facsimile reproduction on facing pages would be necessary in many cases to register how the typography, layout and juxtaposition of images could effect meaning. Some effort is made to follow mise-en-page and shifts of font size, and some of the diagrammatic (mechanomorph) ‘poems’ feature as line illustrations; but it is very hard to assess Picabia’s poetry just from Lowenthal’s book. One can never be sure when one is lost in the work’s intentionally scrambled meaning and when one is just lost in the translation. (Matters are made worse by interference from the volume’s own graphic design style, which borrows from early modernist publicity for each title page, and gives a spurious impression of transcribing Picabia’s originals.) Even so, one is conscious of how mesmerizing, rich and startling some of Picabia’s collaging, randomizing, and destabilizing of language can be. And it is the poetry that remains interesting (as poetry, however crazy), while the odd, uncategorizable pieces of polemic, fragments of theatrical projects, pseudo manifestos and the like are amusing, but of essentially historical interest.

The most difficult strand in Baker’s book, finally, involves his use (and, he admits, abuse) of J.-J. Goux’s elaborations on Marxist ideas of exchange values – concepts of ‘general equivalents’ governing ‘symbolic economies’. (The thinking has been previously co-opted for art theory in Rosalind Krauss’s The Picasso Papers.) Very broadly, the notion has to do with ultimate value sources or authorities (the Father for the ‘exchange of subjects’, the Phallus in transacting objects of desire, Money itself for commodities, Language for semiotic exchange) exerting their power while – and through – becoming necessarily reserved, intouchable, removed from direct use in pure form. Baker suggests all sorts of ways in which Picabia and Dada might be seen to be transgressively apprehending/annulling the withdrawn but all-controlling general equivalent, via concerns with oedeipal patricide; transgendering/ hermaphroditism; masturbation/castration; conception without father/mother; counterfeiting/devaluation (loss of the Gold Standard); demystification of autograph/signature; liberation of art from representation/representation from reality, and so on. But this précis no doubt garbles and misrepresents what is a super-complicated schema, further inflected by, among other things, Saussure’s ideas of linguistic sign, Benjamin’s ideas of the loss of the unique artwork’s auratic authority, Barthes’ ideas about photography’s absent (past) subjects, and Freud’s ideas (via Deleuze via Kaja Silverman) of identity as structured in relation to Father and/or Mother. Along the way many of Baker’s individual observations may seem questionable (e.g. he describes the mechanomorph drawings  as ‘tracings’, closely related to photography and thus about an ‘indexical’ relationship to the absent referent); but the reader may be too intimidated by the abstruseness of the arguments to risk a quibble. Elsewhere Baker is silent on things that seem to cry out for comment, such as how Picabia’s endless series of cliché Spanish Ladies relates to issues (central here) of reproduction and series vs. originality and uniqueness; or more glaringly how Dada’s recurrent Christian references might relate to the ultimate ‘general equivalent’ (surely) of a transcendent God. But again such matters would be best raised only by a someone fully versed in the academic thought being drawn upon.

Baker is of course right that commentators have not got far in interpreting Picabia’s work. But that is true for many of even the most celebrated canonical artists (often indeed overrated precisely because no rigorous criticism has been brought to bare), let alone for artists genuinely (and by a similar logic) underrated. This book certainly takes a strenuous look at Picabia’s Dada works, and perhaps its main insights are such that they could not have been put much more accessibly for the lay audience. But much more remains to be said, much more straightforwardly. Take for instanceThe Merry Widow (La veuve joyeuse), a canvas bearing a photograph of Picabia in his car, pasted above a line drawing of same (p.198). Baker’s reading is typically super-sophisticated. He sees the two images implying a ‘proliferating chain’ like frames in a film strip. He sees a ‘single self image erupting in to two’. He sees Picabia ‘married to his machine’. He gets intimations of promiscuity, of liberation from patriarchal law. He sees photography opening up for Dada ‘a scene of alternate or entirely repressed symbolic economies’. He sees the work in dialogue with Duchamp’s Fresh Widow and Large Glass, an allegory of artistic media (photography above drawing) with photography occupying the zone of the Bride (in terms of the Large Glass) and thus being ‘somehow linked to gender and feminity again’. He sees painting and drawing ‘not replaced by the photograph, but…infected by it’. Thus,

The work of appropriation or the copy that lay at the heart of Picabia’s mechanomorphs was both confirmed here as a photographic principle and (however subtly) shifted. Now, rather than being replaced by the photograph, the work of art starts from it. The photograph lies as an initial model for the work of art – a model that does not replace but lies in communication with both painting and drawing, which proliferate from the photograph as starting point. However, to place the photograph at the origin of the work of art is to place what has been called a “copy without an original” at the place of origin. We seem once again to have veered close to the groundless ground that belongs to the maternal signifier, [it is there that Baker locates Picabia’s ultimate positivity] or at least to a symbolic economy outside the law of the general equivalent form.(p.205-6)

All that, the non-academic will sigh, is as maybe. But The Merry Widow is certainly a very incisive experimental commentary on the nature of art and the condition of painting (the raw canvas is a conspicuous signifier), of drawing, of photography, of linguistic naming and describing, of representation in general. The complex conventions and implications of titling, signing, dating and labelling – literally with a label in one case– are all wryly pointed up (to the extent that the details of title, date, medium, dimensions, ownership, location and copyright restriction, all of which this book dutifully prints below the reproduction, have their own particular absurdity revealed). The title, suggesting a loss that is really a liberation, of course may allude to painting freed (by photography, partly) from ‘faithful’ (or any) depiction. The ironies and ambiguities at work in all the possible relationships between all kinds of signs and what they signify – this is of course the very stuff of the work. The fact that the author – the signatory – is also (in one way, or more) the subject, further multiplies the puzzle. In how many ways is Picabia ‘in’ this work, we find ourselves asking. So much is so significant here: that he looks at the viewer; that he cannot have taken the photo; that he presumably did make the drawing (of the photo, of himself looking now at himself); that his intentions in the work are knowingly, inevitably, open-ended; that he is nevertheless firmly in the driving seat; that the car, as well as the photograph, ‘dates’ the work to the machine age, as much as the numbers ‘1921’ at the lower right; that a rude horn features prominently (sounds can also be signs, and the double image here is a visual ‘beep-beep’ to get our attention); that the work is such that we cannot tell whether the small rectangular hole in the lower left of the canvas (patched from behind) is ‘intentional’, another authorial interrogation of the field of signification, or some later incidental damage; that Picabia smiles mischievously and saucily, not just at his own art games but as if he would make a widow merry, or even somehow be the merry widow (he looks like a sporty dyke); that the title could be pronounced ‘la verve joyeuse’….

So much still needs saying, in plain words, about this and so many of Picabia’s works. About why they are so terrific (when they are; and why not when not). The Merry Widow, from 1921, makes so much subsequent neo-Dada art look so utterly obsolete and routine. This kind of brilliant explicitauto-critique in art by definition cannot be sustained, and Picabia’s salvation (aside from, or perhaps congruent with, whatever liberation he achieves from the tyranny of the ‘general equivalent’ in George Baker’s terms) is that he internalised the lessons of his Dada phase and went on to be an engaging, risky, variable, powerful painter.

The post The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Two on Francis Picabia from MIT appeared first on artcritical.

July 14 to October 9, 2005

Jean Hélion Essays by Didier Ottinger, Henry-Claude Cousseau, Matthew Gale and Debra Bricker Balken (English edition) Paul Holberton Publishing, London, 2004 ISBN 1-903470-27-7

a short version of this article first appeared in The Burlington Magazine

One might have wished for the current Hélion retrospective (originating at the Centre Pompidou in Paris) to come to a really ‘mainstream’ venue for its New York showing. MoMA was perhaps never likely. Robert Storr and others were allowed their moment of revisionism (‘Modern Art Despite Modernism’ and so on) before the museum closed its doors for the big rebuild. Now, apparently, it’s back to a grand established meta-narrative. But for the Guggenheim it would have been a nice move. Hélion was famously dropped by Peggy Guggenheim in the 40s for his heretical move away from abstraction back to figuration. Today he can be seen as one of the prophets of a postmodernism that would eventually bring retrospectives to the Guggenheim from the likes of, say, Clemente and Cucchi.

But in fact it is mistake to concentrate on Hélion’s strategic manoeuvring – on where he stands, what he stands for – at the expense of responding to his works themselves. Celebrating his contrariness, his provocative diversity and unpredictable stylistic manners, is paradoxically to risk doing him a similar disservice as did those who once criticised him for stepping out of line with the avant-garde. What counts is not, as such, that he repudiated abstraction (and then skirted around other movements such as surrealism, post-war realism or Pop). He did so only as a consequence of making the works he felt compelled to make. Parading painting’s affective and semantic potential, his pictures cry out to be critically appreciated and interpreted, not just endorsed as some ‘alternative’ to a discredited – or still tacitly accepted – mainstream canon.

In the exhibition catalogue* long-time Hélion scholars Henry-Claude Cousseau and the show’s curator Didier Ottinger each suggest a wilful perversity in the painter. Cousseau writes of ‘the diversity of the paths he took, paths which broke with, distanced themselves from or went à rebours, “the wrong way up”, to dominant trends’ (p.28). Ottinger mentions ‘heretical’ impulses, first to defying abstraction, then to dream a utopian, monumental art in an age that allowed only disillusioned anti-monuments ( e.g. Guston’s figuration). Happily, both writers move on to Hélion’s transcendence, or rather dissolution, of strategy, and finally offer some observations on his mysterious works themselves.

Still, in the face of the exhibition’s embarrassment of riches, one feels individual paintings have scarcely begun to be understood. Each requires close reading to yield its revelations on the relationships of people to each other, to art, and to the world. For example, the human comedy in “The Exhibition of 1934,” (1979-80) slowly emerges from odd, chromatic shadows. Flakey highlights cast figures into a kind of motly. They are each oddly alone, despite their proximity in the elastic envelop of pictorial space. Figures crowd an art gallery. A kneeling youth seems to worship at the altar of an abstract canvas, yet also appears to ‘play’ it like to keyboard of a piano. Its marks appear to flow from his finger. A seated figure also gestures like a pianist. A central ‘everyman’ (or artist?), sits akimbo, vaguely buddha-like, dreaming. From his neck a second head seems to sprout – but it is that of a girl sitting behind him. Another woman sits some way off, a ‘wallflower’ at the party, eyes visored, casting a curiously masculine shadow-companion for herself. Another woman, standing, is alone in actually looking at the art, though she too might be gazing, abstracted, into the distance. Other eyes are closed, blind, averted. The whole group is a bouquet, emanating from a vase of flowers, bottom right.

Early on, admittedly, Hélion seemed a tactician. This show includes orthogonal abstractions of around 1930 when he was tirelessly proselytising and organising for non-objective art. But even as a partisan of abstraction he was never simply concerned with being on the ‘right side’ ideologically or stylistically. His pictures outshine apparently similar neo-plastic exercises (by, say, Vantongerloo or Vordemberge-Gildewart), because his facture, surface, materiality and nuanced tone and hue have a life beyond nuts-and-bolts abstract research. In a catalogue essay about Hélion’s extensive influence on British abstraction, Matthew Gale confirms that he appealed to criteria of artistic excellence beyond superficial stylistic allegiance when vetting artists for group exhibitions, coverage in the magazines and publications, or membership to progressive groups such as Art Concret and Abstraction-Création.

His increasingly curvilinear and spatial compositions towards the mid ‘thirties, with their shards of colour floating in deep space, their swinging, counterbalanced shapes and tromp-loeil convexities, increasingly proclaim that pictorial vitality and character is what matters, not aesthetic theory. Prime examples of these works, from museums all over the world, made a majestic sequence in the Paris version of this show, and hopefully several will be in the (much reduced) New York hang. Seurat and Poussin were among Hélion’s acknowledged masters at the time, and while he wrote of them (in the progressive Axis magazine and elsewhere) in formalist terms, his own pictures announce their affinity with past art in subtle ways hardly done justice to by truisms about shared visual rhythm and structure. An abstract canvas by Hélion is recognisably the same category of object as a David, a Louis Le Nain or a Ucello, not least in making the viewer hyperaware of the a skin of paint on a surface, actively and, as it were, continually (re-)generating and sustaining the image. Such is also true of many Mondrians, but – for example – few Van Doesbergs, and no Kandinskys at this period. At the same time, while Hélion maintains this kinship with painting tradition, he manages to avoid the impression of being a representational painter who is simply depicting an abstract ‘motif’, as happens in all but the most rigourous of Kupka, or in Picabia‘s Orphist period (with which Hélion in the ‘30s has certain similarities).

Unlike many previous Hélion retrospectives (none of which has come to a New York museum), the layout of the present exhibition – and catalogue – is thematic and only loosely chronological. For example, two 1939 paintings of heads, Charles and Édouard, from a series marking the artist’s return to figuration, are actually presented prior to the body of abstractions. Thus they foretell not just the formal affinities across different categories of Hélion’s art (Charles and Édouard, with their hats, collars and ties, are models of composure), but they also signal issues of perception, consciousness and agency running through the oeuvre. Again, it is midway among the abstractions that we find inserted the 1979-80 painting The Exhibition of 1934, the burlesque conversation piece in which figures gather at a show of Hélion’s own earlier abstractions.

Throughout the present exhibition there are – were in Paris at least – juxtapositions of cross-related works. Bright, gestural images of falling figures from the ‘70s and ‘80s are put with the hard, steely “Fallen Figure” of 1939, in which abstract forms assemble into quasi-representation. Late, sloshy nudes hang next to ones rendered in Hélion’s strange, neutral realism of the early ‘50s or in his cartoonish yet chalky handling of the late ‘40s. Haunted allegories of somnambulant city life, evoked in the inky blues and blacks of his feathery 1960s manner, echo gaudy polyptychs of the 80s, mythologising the quotidian. Paired and grouped to great effect are festooned tabletop pictures, and ones of flea-market-style junk jumbles. Cast off clothing, ragged or voluptuous vegetables and loaves, all talk to each other, as do musical instruments and newspapers, folding chairs and other sticks of furniture, twigs and branches, ornings, sewing machines. At critical intervals we are given key pictures that often set the trends for recurrent iconography. “With Cyclist,” (1939) inaugurates the window-and-door dramas, the passing cyclists, the gents with umbrellas, the smokers, the opposition of ‘in’ and ‘out’ – all common in Hélion. “Défence D’,” (1943) announces his creed of semantic continuum, from written word through visual representation to ambiguous or abstract colour and form. The hat brim covering the eyes in this, as in so many paintings, flags notions of inner and outer sight, identity and anonymity. “The Stairs” (1944) introduces blindness, (an increasing concern up to the loss of Hélion’s own sight late in life) and enshrines the key principles of ascent, descent, rotation, pairing. “Wrong Way Up” (1947) with its gallery frontage displaying an abstract picture, begins the symbolic juxtaposition of art and reality and the play between shop window and street life. The ubiquitous newspaper readers are definitively assembled on a park bench in “The Big Daily Read” (1950). (Many of the artist’s pungent titles have been creatively Anglicised for this publication.)

Large as it was is Paris, the show was still selective. Drawings, sketchbooks and pastels were sparingly chosen for their relation to paintings. Many major canvases were absent, such as the plough and ploughed earth images and the Tuillerie Gardens paintings from the ‘50s, the Paris rooftop paintings and May ‘68 pictures from the next decade, or the almost sci-fi city visions of the ‘70s. But it is as well that the show offers focus rather than compendiousness. Long reflection is required to register the formal ‘key’ of each work. A barrier has to be crossed to access the visual-conceptual orchestration and animism that give ‘approfondisment’ to the more evident puns on form and function – the rhyming of poses and gestures, the conflating of figures (sharing heads or limbs). The flagrant vulgarity of the work is also a challenge, rubbing the viewer’s nose in the psychedelic tatters of Hélion’s vision. His is an acquired taselessness.

Indeed, the yet further editing of the exhibition for New York may be an advantage rather than otherwise, demanding, as it should, more focus on single pictures. American audiences may find Hélion hard to ‘get’. Debra Bricker Balken’s catalogue essay covers his active influence in the the USA up to World War II, and a satellite display at the Academy Museum will explore ‘Hélion and American Art’; but Balken’s impression is essentially that he has slipped out of visibility. She is aware that Leland Bell and other ‘Jane Street’ artists faithfully championed Hélion long after the War, and certainly he is well known across a couple of generations of figurative painters that one might associate with galleries such as Tibor de Nagy or Salander O’Reilly (the latter staged a smaller Hélion survey a few years ago). Critic Jed Perl has written about Hélion as part of his promotion of a traditionalist alternative to institutionalised avant-gardism. Hilton Kramer has discussed him too, though tending to approve the overall effort of Hélion’s visionary figuration more than his individual pictorial achievements.

Hopefully, though, some New York viewers will see comparisons with all sorts of other painting that has been visible in the city at different times. Hélion associated with artists such as Saul Steinberg and Richard Lindner, and has affinities with Willaim Copley, Lester Johnson, Bob Thompson and other figures (often ones who are themselves ripe for reassessment). Carroll Dunham will surely come to some viewer’s minds, as will names from younger generations. Look at “The Accident,” (1979) and think of Thomas Scheibitz. Look at “Odalisque.” (1953) and think of Lisa Yuskavage. Look at “The Last Judgment of Things,” (1978-79) and think of Neo Rauch. Hopefully it is the contemporary relevance of Hélion that will be recognised, and in turn the necessity for current painting, in this period of ploymorphous boom, to take account of its own complex recent history.

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