The deaths of Andre Masson and Jean Helion late last month were reminders of how close we are to the complete passing of those generations that defined the modernist avant garde.
Of course, this disappearance was inevitable, but that it is now so near at hand carries something of a shock.
To realize, for example, that Dali, Delvaux and Matta are the last of the pioneering Surrealists is to grasp that they, and they alone, embody a world whose ideas and values have long since vanished.
Masson was of that world; indeed, he was one of its most important representatives, exerting considerable influence on such later artists as Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.
What`s more, he made an impression from his very first show, for already then, in 1924, Masson was doing a kind of painting that gave direct and powerful access to the unconscious.
These pictures combined dark, harrowing symbols with Cubist structure, giving the sense of obsessions bubbling unstoppably to the surface. Masson evoked them by letting his hand work without premeditation; hence, his involvement with automatism.
”The Four Elements,” one of Masson`s paintings from 1924, attracted the attention of poet and theorist Andre Breton, who visited his studio and asked him to join the about-to-be-launched Surrealist movement. Though Masson was an anarchist by temperament, he did join and remained for five years, during which he also brought in his friend and neighbor, Joan Miro.
Some of the ”automatic” paintings from this period came about from Masson`s drawing in adhesive without conscious guidance and adding color by sprinkling colored sand. The pieces that are widely considered his greatest date from around 1930 and maintain the combination of automatism with a simplified, Cubist-derived structure.
Masson`s world view was conditioned by his experience in World War I, during which he was wounded severely. The Spanish Civil War and World War II also affected his art, though results were not as strong esthetically, owing to an increase both in verism and stridency.
Only as an American expatriate during the early 1940s did Masson return to his earlier style, and the monumental vigor of these paintings, sometimes suggesting the strength of ancient art, was part of what impressed the Abstract Expressionists.
After he returned to France in 1945, Masson gradually developed a new vision that he said was indebted to ”the lofty doctrine of (19th-Century British artist J.M.W.) Turner and the spiritual message of Zen painting.”
Such works were more luminous and lyrical, even if they still came to completion through Masson`s use of automatic methods.
At the end, his work was as reliant on the liberating practices of his youth as it was in the beginning, for he held steadfast to his mission of penetrating and expressing the unconscious.
Subject matter thus was important to him, providing a meaningful outlet from the confines of Cubism. But in his best works he does not lose himself in what he called ”the poetry of the heart”; he still commands strong organizing principles.
Masson was the last major French Surrealist to gain widespread acclaim, and there is an irony in how it came to him precisely at the time that his characteristic style loosened and lightened. He was perhaps least himself in these works, though it also may be argued that their spiritual atmosphere showed a resolution to a lifetime of troubled curiosity.
Helion`s career, too, has its moment of resolution, but it came relatively early and, in one crucial respect, still is debated.
The artist began painting in 1922, when he moved to Paris from a village in Normandy where he had studied architecture and engineering. His earliest works were still-lifes, portraits and landscapes, some of which he
subsequently acknowledged as ”very ugly.”
He had no lessons in painting though probably was predisposed by training toward work of a highly controlled nature. And that Helion found in 1926 when he was introduced to Cubism by Joaquin Torres-Garcia, a Uruguayan painter living in Paris.
From 1926 to 1929 Helion`s work slowly evolved toward abstraction. Later he would write how artists of the period had ”a need for the absolute (that) was tremendous,” but in his case it came about more paradoxically, through an increased involvement with reality.
”I wished to seize (reality) by the core, by its hole,” said Helion.
”That is how I began painting in broader and broader strokes, to the point that the object was soon drowned in them. For me, abstract painting grew out of broad brushstrokes: a jug became a spot and the spot finally spread to the edge of the canvas . . . . ”
Once that process took place, however, Helion stood firm in his desire for a ”universal” art constructed solely from rational, mechanical, wholly emotionless principles. To achieve this end, in 1930 he collaborated with Dutch painter Theo Van Doesburg and several others to form a group known as Art Concret.
Less than a year later, after experiencing financial difficulties, the group was rechristened Abstraction-Creation, with the purpose of explaining how some of its artists arrived at nonrepresentational forms by abstracting nature and others by creating pure geometry.
As befitting a group with international tendencies, Helion visited Berlin and the Soviet Union, making friends with many painters. The friendship that had the clearest impress on his art, however, was the one with Piet Mondrian, who had been living in Paris.
Helion`s abstract style changed considerably until 1939, by which time he had created some of the most lyrical paintings of the period. The finest have curved planes interlocking to create keenly balanced figures and architectural structures. As such a description implies, Helion apparently was edging back toward representation.
The turning point came with World War II. At its outbreak Helion was living in the United States, about to become an American citizen. But in January, 1940, he returned to Paris to join the French army, from which he was taken prisoner by the Germans. His 1943 book ”They Shall Not Have Me”
recounted his interment and eventual escape.
After the war, all Helion`s work was based on observable reality. He once implied that itwas a direct result of the combat experience, but others said his art already was tending that way and still others spoke only of betrayal. Whichever, his paintings remained tied to the everyday and touched by genius even after the artist lost the use of his left eye in 1972. That few in America praised their achievement over the abstractions was not unusual, for Helion was a quintessentially French painter whose later efforts were best appreciated by his countrymen.
Still, the day will come when his strange and generous figure paintings will be recognized more widely as an heroic achievement, and that is bound to lead to one of the happier reappraisals of the 20th Century.
