HÉLION Jean (1907-1987)

Lot 15
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Estimation :
700 - 800 EUR
Result with fees
Result : 650EUR
HÉLION Jean (1907-1987)
L.S. "Hélion" with additions and autograph corrections, New-York 20 [and 21] November 1936, to Raymond QUENEAU; 5 pages and a half in-4 typed. Long letter describing his new installation in New-York, where he found CALDER, and where he appreciates that people talk about the war and Europe as distant abscesses; the countries and their governments seem derisory. "I'm not happy, but at least I'm not overwhelmed. I am a little free; I am hiding in my own shadow"? He tries to paint, like a stone breaker trying to make them bloom. "I have built up a short collection of terms with great difficulty of eyes and hands, a short collection of terms that I am building together, and I try to make blood flow through it, my blood as it bothers me inside, and the blood of the earth as it vibrates beneath my footsteps", but the poverty of his canvases makes him desolate. He explains his procedure, honest and miserable. "It is only the painting of the elders that consoles me a little. [...] Everything that is said about the richness of abstractions, I know; I invented a good part of it myself; but it is all too short. A man, a human form, there is no end to it"... Hélion cares about France, but she appears "more tragically cornered than ever and so weak in her foreign policy that I feel like crying out for drowning. ...] And I revolt to see the arbitrary influence, the tendency of totalitarian government coming from Hitler and Mussolini, before which we do not have enough political or racial tension to avoid being contaminated and dominated. If this continues for another two or three years, we will become a colony in the Germanic influence zone."
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