Born in 1904 in Normandy, Jean Hélion turned at seventeen toward the School of Architecture and Engineering in Lille before setting out to try his luck in Paris. 

There he discovered the Musée du Louvre and its treasures, with a particular admiration for the works of Philippe de Champaigne and Nicolas Poussin. From that point on, he devoted himself entirely to painting.

Marked by Mondrian, Hélion established himself in art history as early as 1930 by founding, with Théo Van Doesburg and Léon Tutundjian, the group Art Concret — the first French avant‑garde fully oriented toward abstraction — which became the Abstraction‑Création movement in 1931 with Arp, Delaunay, Herbin, Kupka, Gleizes, Valmier…

In 1934 Hélion traveled to London, where he met Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Then came his trips to the United States, where he formed friendships with Marcel Duchamp, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell — the latter celebrating Hélion as “one of the best abstract painters in New York”!

During this ten‑year period (1929–1939), Jean Hélion’s work evolved as he freed himself from the constraints of Mondrian’s pure abstraction, moving gradually toward an expression in which figuration began to emerge. Thus, as early as 1933, his Compositions, Tensions, and Equilibres unfolded across his canvases and works on paper. In them, he demonstrated his full command of volumes and planes of color — qualities that would make Hélion an unmatched master of abstract painting.

This deeply shift culminated in 1939 with the celebrated Figure tombé (Fallen Figure), now held at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou — a pivotal artistic and historical marker of his passage from abstraction to figuration.