Top 11 Quotes & Sayings by Jean Helion

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French author Jean Helion.
Last updated on November 17, 2024.
Jean Helion

Jean Hélion was a French painter whose abstract work of the 1930s established him as a leading modernist. His midcareer rejection of abstraction was followed by nearly five decades as a figurative painter. He was also the author of several books and an extensive body of critical writing.

I understand abstract art as an attempt to feed imagination with a world built through the basic sensations of the eyes.
A mature artist is at the same time aware of the futility of his achievement and the validity of the pursuit.
Paul Klee seems to handle colors and dreams as if they both came out of a box of children's toys. He plays and dreams with whatever he finds. — © Jean Helion
Paul Klee seems to handle colors and dreams as if they both came out of a box of children's toys. He plays and dreams with whatever he finds.
All each ism does, in its revolt against the inadequacy of the previous one, is to thoroughly upset the order of terms of this ideal entity and to bring to the fore yet another inadequacy.
You don't dream about angles and surfaces and so on. You dream about women, bread, smokes and trees.
The image gets built one way or another... it doesn't get done by following the natural order of things, but arises instead from an order that you have in your mind.
Art is, from any point of view, the greatest of risks.
Imaginations blossom amidst memories. One judiciously separates them - but is there really any point in that? Doesn't truth suffer when one amputates it from its context of dreams?
Sometimes when looking through my pile of drawings, I find an image that... awakens in me a passionate desire to inhabit it, as though I were to feel more at home in it than in myself.
A harmonious combination... enough abstraction that the image is sustained by the eye; enough reality that it is sustained by reason and experience. Share this quote with a friend
No doubt, in complete abstraction one has a feeling of a great shock, if not an explosion, and in approaching the real, one feels health and truth restored.
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