Böcker av Jean Helion

Jean Helion, the French painter who died at eighty-three in 1987, brought together in his copious and essential writing on art the theoretical authority of the intellectual and the fundamental insights of the craftsman in his studio. His writing extended throughout the five decades or more of his career.Soon after the young painter's arrival in Paris from the provinces, he began a literary-art magazine; he wrote polemical articles as a leading avant-garde abstractionist; he wrote about the great tradition of figure painting while still painting abstractions; and he wrote journals, notes on studio practice, pieces about the role of the artist in society, and much more. His prolificacy is made more extraordinary because he wrote in two languages?having lived in the United States for some years, he wrote many of his articles in English for an American and British audience.This volume collects, for the first time, the diverse writings by Helion that appeared in print originally in English, including ?The Abstract Artist in Society,"e; ?Poussin, Seurat, and Double Rhythm,"e; ?Objects for a Painter,"e; and many more. Double Rhythm is sure to become essential reading for art historians and painters.

A French painter-turned-soldier's memoir of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp and ';one of the most sensational escapes from the Nazis in World War II' (Time). French painter Jean Helion was friends with the likes of Mondrian, Giacometti, and Balthus, and had a role in shaping the path of modern art. But when Helion's infantry platoon was captured by the German army and sent to hard labor, Helion was forced to live without his art. They Shall Not Have Me is Helion's account of the prisoner-of-war camp: the sights, sounds, smells, the captors, and the captured. After almost two years, Helion succeeded in a daring escape to freedom. According to American poet John Ashbery, Helion's ';account of his adventures in captivity is both terrifying and funny, somewhat in the vein of Tarantino's film Inglorious Basterds. A best-seller after it was published in America while the war was still raging, it has remained for many, including Helion's legions of admirers in both France and the United States, a one-of-a-kind classic.'