Shatter was determined that people take watercolor seriously, forcing them to rethink stereotypes arising from the Victorian era when it had earned its reputation as the polite medium of amateurs.  In 2002 I had the privilege to work alongside her in an exhibition she instigated at the New York Studio School, a bold curatorial venture of forty contemporary artists ranging from well-known exponents such as Francesco Clemente, Marlene Dumas, Philip Pearlstein, Al Held, Elizabeth Peyton, Sean Scully, Graham Nickson and David Salle to truly marvelous artists known in smaller circles for their inventive, at times subversive use of the medium to yield singular effects beyond the tropes of wash or translucence, artists like Patricia Tobacco-Forrester (who also passed away this year), Ray Kass and Donald Holden.  It was typical of her feisty attitude towards artistic excellence that Susan would think nothing of bringing together artists of very different milieu and allowing their equality to be asserted on the gallery walls.

Shatter was a great believer in art community.  She was a regular colonist at Yaddo, for instance, and was active in the National Academy of Design, where she served as Treasurer and then, until her illness forced early retirement, as President. Devotees of The Review Panel in particular are in her debt for stewarding the program (with former President Gregory Amenoff) to the NA during turbulent and challenging years for that institution.

Susan Shatter was a native New Yorker.  She studied at Boston University, Pratt Institute and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, and was the subject of over thirty solo exhibitions, receiving her debut in 1975 at the Harcus Krakow Roen Sonnabend Gallery in Boston, Mass.  A significant exhibition of her work, Tracking the Terrain, that brought together her breast cancer series and landscape paintings, took place in 2003 at the State University of New York at Stonybook and was accompanied by a catalog written by Donald Kuspit.

A memorial for Susan Shatter will take place at the Century Association (7 West 43rd Street) on October 5 at 5 pm.

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The School of Visual Arts launches its Fall 2010 season of lectures with painter and critic Alexi Worth in a talk organized by the School’s BFA Visual and Critical Studies Department.  Worth, who shows his visually witty art-historically referential hybrids of Mannerist painting and cartoonery at DC Moore Gallery. speaks at the School’s 133/141 West 21st Street building, Rooom 101C at 6.30pm Tuesday September 14.  Also up this week at the same venue is a panel titled “Not Nature Poems” with Rackstraw Downes, Brenda Iijima, Joan Richardson and Jonathan Skinner, moderated by Vincent Katz and Tim Peterson, in the first in what is billed as a “quips and cranks” series on poetics in the arts. The panel takes place Thursday, September 16, same time and room as Worth.  Both events are free and open to all.

The National Academy Museum, host with artcritical magazine of The Review Panel, has announced the line-up for this popular series for 2010-11 which takes place despite the overhaul of their premises this season, where most else of their programming in on hold.  The season includes newcomers to the panel Barbara MacAdam, John Perreault, Alexandra Anderson Spivy, Elisabeth Kley, Hilarie Sheets, Eva Diaz, Marjorie Welish, Ariela Budick and Jeffrey Kastner along with returning favorites Stephanie Buhmann, Peter Plagens, Blake Gopnik, Robert Storr, Sarah Valdez, Joan Waltemath, David Carrier and Colleen Asper.  As ever, the series is moderated by articritical’s Publisher/Editor David Cohen.  The season launches September 24 when Lance Esplund, Faye Hirsch and Andrea K. Scott, all “repeat offenders” on the Review Panel, join Cohen to review Adam Fuss at Cheim & Read, Roman Signer at the Swiss Institute, Arlene Shechet at Jack Shainman and Joan Synder at Betty Cuningham.  At 1083 Fifth Avenue at 6.45pm.

The New York Studio School lecture series launches October 5 with painter Suzan Frecon, currently exhibiting at David Zwirner Gallery, talking about her work, and sculptor William Tucker addressing thoughts to Matisse Sculpture the next day.  Both talks at 6.30pm and free, but patrons will need to get there early to secure seats for some of the speakers this season who include Michael Taylor on Gorky, David Cohen on Sickert, Hayden Herrera on Frida Kahlo, Renaissance scholar Alexander Nagel on “Two Prophecies of Modern Art,” and of course artists on their own work, including Phong Bui, Karlis Rekevics, Shahzia Sikander, and, on Thursday, November 4, Belgian painter Luc Tuymans.

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On view at the National Academy as part of the 185th Annual Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art, through June 8. Parness was winner of the Harry Watrous Prize for Painting. Other winners this year were Richard McLean, Elisa Jensen, Richard Raiselis, Dana Schutz, Richard Van Buren and Chuck Holtzman.

This was an artcritical PIC in April 2010

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on view at the National Academy’s 184th Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Art (until June 10). The exhibition of 191 artists from across the nation includes an array of the great and the good that crosses boundaries of trad and trendy, making the NA an academy in the best sense of the word, uniting artists of quality. Exhibitors in this year’s instalment of the biennial event include Gregory Amenoff, Stephen Antonakos, William Bailey,  Robert Berlind, Will Barnet, Charles Cajori, Sue Coe, Susanna Coffey, Janet Fish, Jane Freilicher, Mark Greenwold, RIchard Haas, Yvonne Jacquette, Wolf Kahn,  William King, Albert Kresch, Ellen Lanyon, Whitfield Lovell, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Raoul Middleman, Ruth Miller, John Moore, George Nick, Thomas Nozkowski, Pat Passlof, Philip Pearlstein, Paul Resika, Faith Ringgold, Harriet Shorr, Joan SnyderSusan Jane Walp, Betty Woodman. Rockburne is the honoree of the Academy’s annual fundraising gala on May 5 alongside philanthropist Robert Levinson. 1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, 212 369 4880

This was an artcritical PIC in April 2009

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Everyone knows Albert Pinkham Ryder, but mention of Ralph Albert Blakelock, also born in 1847, is rare and seldom passes beyond a fleeting reference to his Romantic moonlight landscapes.  Underrated and misunderstood in his lifetime, Blakelock remains hobbled by his near inclusion in the 1913 Armory show, an exhibition which eventually sealed Ryder’s modernist credentials.   In 1867 Blakelock exhibited his first landscape at the National Academy of Design; fortunately the same National Academy is now offering a reexamination of Blakelock’s achievements in The Unknown Blakelock.

Unlike the young American Impressionists, who embarked on grand tours to Europe, Blakelock remained in New York City.  He painted the ramshackle Shanties (1864) within a stones throw from where the Draft Riots had occurred a year earlier.  In these intimate yet forceful paintings, inspired by Adriaen and Isaac van Ostade’s Dutch genre scenes, Blakelock approaches his subjects with the urgency of a documentarian.

During the introspective post-Civil War period, from 1869 until 1873, Blakelock traveled the American west alone.  In Western Landscape (1871), Blakelock features a sharply focused foreground and deep atmospheric perspective that are emblematic of the crystalline naturalism of Hudson River School painters such as Cole and Bierstadt.

While Blakelock stoically experienced an authentic, primeval American landscape and studied life at various Indian encampments, he was aware of recent developments in European painting as well.  Blakelock’s European influence was indirect but significant.  Like the Hudson River School painters, he emulated Ruysdale, Lorraine and Turner.  Additionally, the shockwaves of Constable’s 1824 exhibition at the Salon de Paris, which helped galvanize the Barbizon School, would eventually impact Blakelock’s own burgeoning subjective expression.  For Blakelock, Constable’s declaration that “painting is but another word for feeling” rang true.

Blakelock’s rejection of tonalism is evident in Maiden of the Midst (undated).  Here, he transmutes a typically cropped view of Niagara Falls into a Symbolist themed, kaleidoscopic swirl of rainbow color and impasto. In Seal Rock (undated) he seems to have hot-wired the Impressionist palette.  Fusing Turner’s V-shaped light with Odilon Redon’s colorful Pegasus-themed pastels and Gutave Moreau’s  Europaand the Bull psychedelics of 1869,  Seal Rock is bizarrely incongruent, gaudy, and forward-looking.  (Blakelock’s own late version of Pegasus is included in the exhibition.)

In the 1870’s, in order to heighten color effects, Blakelock lightly abraded the wooden cigar box surfaces upon which he occasionally painted. By the 1880’s he was loading his canvas with pigment, infusing it with light color, allowing it to harden, and polishing some ridges down with a meat cleaver and pumice stone. He would repeat the cycle multiple times, reacting to the surface without regard for the final image.  Because of the long drying time, Blakelock processed several paintings concurrently and often varied his method, which to some degree explains the variety of effects from painting to painting.  The moonlight landscapes of the 1880’s are striking examples.  In Moonlight Silver and Old Lace, the flickering light is achieved by exploiting the uneven relief of the surface.  At first glance, the telescoped view seems like a detail of sky cut from a much larger canvas. But the suggestion of a stream at the bottom edge of the painting suddenly recalibrates the scale and affirms the wholeness of the composition.  And so it is throughout this exhibition, as each painting reveals its own individuated resonance and singularity.

The strange surface of Moonlight Sonata, a landscape of 1889, emits a deep glowing blue from a glassy, backlit source. The effect of color immersion is similar to that of wearing big wraparound sunglasses. The process is inscrutable, as the surface appears to be leather infused with colored glass.  The dramatic flat silhouettes of the trees are informed by the haunting, romantic symbolism of Caper David Friedrich.  The placement of trees as a framing device also evidences the continuing model of Claude Lorraine.

In At Nature’s Mirror (1880), Blakelock unpacks the pastorals of Giorgione, Titian and Poussin with a new attention to the autonomy of paint on the surface. Certain areas look as if they are imprinted or stamped in paint. Viewed up close, the low hanging white sky floats assertively in the foreground; from two steps away, it recedes, glowing and distant in the background. It is a startling manipulation.  Hard contours yield to soft ones, and stippling turns into dry brush drags and scrapes.  Skirmishes for spatial dominance abound throughout the treeline, as foliage and sky tussle in tit-for-tat reiteration. A proto-Richteresque smear in ochre appears in the lower middle ground on the left.  It is a move Blakelock used with greater abandon in his later period, as the material process dissociated from the image and increasingly became what the painting is about.  Later, in Woodland Brook (undated), this tendency increases in scale and effect, producing a painterly activity and spatial ambiguity throughout the surface that, via Venetian painting and Romanticism, is prescient of Abstract Expressionism.

Blakelock was known as an exemplary colorist by his contemporaries.  And as Blakelock reexamines theme, material and process, so does he color.  In Twilight (1898), he applies new processes as he revisits the glowing golden light of his western Indian encampment sunset scenes from twenty years earlier. As in Church’s landscape of the same title, the amber sky grabs the viewer’s attention from across the room.  The recapitulated theme and strangely waxy, raised, encaustic-like surface are compelling testaments to Blakelock’s unquenchable curiosity, experimentation and non-linear progression.

Blakelock seems to have leap-frogged Impressionism, Divisionism and Cubism, arriving at an early form of Abstract Expressionism. Later, during his institutionalization for a mental breakdown, Blakelock returned to the small wooden panel format of his early years.  Again he abraded and merged the raw surface within the image, which now bore resemblance to those of Augustus Tack, Clifford Still and Franz Kline.  Also late and undated is Early Autumn, the most extraordinary painting in the show.  It hosts a dizzying array of expressive painterly techniques that liquefy the landscape.  In addition to his spontaneous brushstrokes, Blakelock explores a decalcomania-like technique of load, press, smear, and lift. This emphatically material-based process creates a raised, textural web of paint activity with a few scattered red, orange and yellows flecking a surface that is eerily similar to Jackson Pollock’s and as interesting to ponder.  Unknown Blakelock indeed.

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Exhibition curated by Katy Siegel with David Reed

National Academy Museum until April 22
1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, 212 369 4880

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, February 15, 2007 under the title “Painting when Painting was Dead”

Maybe it is because the word “times” occurs twice in its title that  “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-75” achieves such a feeling for period.  Even for someone who was a toddler when the experimental abstract painting in this lively, intelligent, informative survey got going—in another continent, to boot—dejà vu seems to waft from the National Academy’s fabric walls.  What must this show feel like for people who lived through those years?

This was the era of spray guns and masking tape.  So many of these dishevelled yet sparky paintings and paint-based objects have the trippy, hippy look of the years of the flower power movement, civil rights, ecology, and emerging feminism and gay liberation.  Even brightly colored works have a limp, tie-dye, impoverished quality.  Everything is rough at the edges, made from cheap or recycled materials, informal or provisional in arrangement, sometimes ethnic-looking, other times futuristic, and always at once earnest and nonchalent—in harmony with what one knows (or projects) of the look and feel of bohemia, the city, and youth culture at that time.

The show looks at painting in a truly transitional moment.  The medium was under sustained assault from an avant garde that, empowered by the ascendancy of sculpture, installation, performance and film/video, insisted that painting was dead.  Of course, hundreds of painters worked experimentally and optimistically through such rhetoric, but there were some determined to be part of the revolution who nonetheless wanted to paint.  For them, according to Katy Siegel, the exhibition’s curator (advised by painter David Reed, with whom the idea for this show originated) the radical critique of painting was liberating, “an opportunity, not a pink slip.”

Indeed, the heavy duty insistence on painting’s demise is now seen by defenders of the painters in this show as itself macho, authoritarian, and locked into an earlier aesthetic, which by the late 1960s was an institutionalized revolution.  These artists found a space for themselves between the dogmatics of minimal and conceptual art on the one hand and the formalist abstraction championed by the critic Clement Greenberg, on the other. Having their cake and eating it, they wanted to enjoy playing with shape, form, color, and material and feel that they were structurally questioning the language of art in the process.

In terms of inclusiveness and free flow this new painting was obviously a backlash against the prim, austere negations of minimal art, but it would be simplistic to see it as a pendulum swing back towards the defiant gestures of Abstract Expressionism.  If there is one artist in the show of whom this might be the case it is Joan Synder, whose painting, “The Storm” (1974) has a rich, romantic mythic sensibility.  Generally, however open and loose looking their forms, the artists were interested in upfrontness and process, not in mystery and nebulousness.

The first galleries have the most pictorially conventional canvases of the show.  “Pavo” (1968), a large Dan Christensen of nine-by-eleven feet, has overlapping fuzzy circles spray painted in bright colors, while Kenneth Showell’s “Besped” (1967) is a warped grid of spray-painted little squares bent into trapezoids and parallelepipeds.  The spray in both paintings is at once illusionist and a literal, fact of process. Jo Baer’s “Speculum” (1970) is a precisionist geometric abstraction.  On its front the picture is mostly monochrome, with most of the composition taking place along the deep edges.  Ms. Baer had taken on the anti-painting rhetoric of Artforum magazine, which moved to New York from California in 1967, in an influential letter to its editor.

Once the visitor moves to the large second floor gallery, however, order and precision give way to scatter and flop.  But still, however limp they have become, grids still predominate. “Put a Name on It Please” (1972), by Alan Shields, a diagonal grid looking at first like a badminton net caught in a gale, is made of cotton belting embellished by strings of bead. Its mix of a structural element from high modernism and almost louche use of cheap and unlikely materials sets the tone for a kind of hippy abstraction.  Howardena Pindell’s “Untitled” (1968-70), an open grid of sausage-like rolls of canvas joined by metal grommets, and Louise Fishman’s “Untitled” (1971) of string sewn into strips of canvas, are limpid grids that tease this signifier of order and regularity.  For many feminist artists, a use of craft elements like sewing was a self-consciously political gesture, a critique of masculine authority.

And women dominate this show in terms of the most striking and original forms: There is Lynda Benglis with “Blatt” (1969), a floor piece formed of poured pigment and latex that curdled into a free-standing puddle free of any canvas or support.  Mary Heilmann’s “The Book of Night” (1970) is a deep-stained black canvas, free of stretcher, that also lies horizontally, in this case with a kink in it on a chest-high pedestal.  Dorothea Rockburne’s “Intersection” (1971), a kind of oil sandwich in which thick, viscous black oil is contained within transparent plastic sheeting laid out of the floor.  Imprinted on the plastic is, once again, a grid.  Carolee Schneemann, a pioneer of performance and feminist art, is represented by a video of her 1967 piece, “Body Collage” (1967) in which she dabbed her naked body in glue and rolled around over bits of paper and fabric.  Her inclusion is a provocative statement in a show of painting, an insistence that process, gesture and intention trump product or effect.  It is taken as significant that she described herself, in early group shows, as a painter.

Many of the artists in this show have fallen from attention, while others—like Ms. Heilmann and Ms. Rockburne—returned to conventional formats in their mature careers.  What also happened is that shortly after the time frame of this exhibition New York witnessed a resurgence of abstract painting.  Figures who now dominate that genre such as Bill Jensen, Thomas Nozkowski, Melissa Meyer, Sean Scully,  and Mr. Reed himself, all found their feet in the wake of these years of “way out” experiment.  There is a clear trade off between radicality and quality in such artists who are more conservative in format but nuanced in painterly achievement.  But for sheer permission to play there is a debt to those who scaled the high, hard times.

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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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