Jean Hélion

Jean Hélion (1904–1987) was a French painter who began his career as a pioneering abstract artist in the 1930s, associated with the international avant-garde and the group Art Concret. In a dramatic artistic reversal in the 1940s, he abandoned abstraction in favor of a figurative style populated by everyday objects, crowds, and street scenes rendered in a bold, monumental manner. He is regarded as a significant and independent figure in 20th-century European art, bridging the gap between geometric abstraction and figurative painting.