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Jean Hélion
Composition, Société internationale d'art XXe siècle

1938

$716
$89520% Off
£541.83
£677.2820% Off
€624.90
€781.1220% Off
CA$999.84
CA$1,249.8120% Off
A$1,120.15
A$1,400.1920% Off
CHF 583.04
CHF 728.8020% Off
MX$13,641.27
MX$17,051.5820% Off
NOK 7,427.11
NOK 9,283.8820% Off
SEK 6,994.24
SEK 8,742.8020% Off
DKK 4,664.78
DKK 5,830.9720% Off
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About the Item

Linocut on vélin paper. Paper Size: 12.4 x 9.65 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the album, XXe siècle, Chroniques du jour, 13 rue Valette (5e), Directeur G. di San Lazzaro, Sommaire du n°4, Nóel, 1938. Published and printed by Gualtieri di San Lazzaro, éditeur, Paris, in collaboration with Société Internationale d'Art XXe siècle, Paris, 1938. Additional notes: Excerpted from the academic article, “Promoting Original Prints, The Role of Gualtieri di San Lazzaro and XXe Siècle” by Valerie Holman, published in Print Quarterly, XXXIII, 2016, 2, Until recently very little has been written on the Italian author and art publisher Gualtieri di San Lazzaro (1904-75), yet for 50 years he chronicled the life and work of contemporary artists, produced monographs of exceptional quality, and disseminated original prints by modern painters and sculptors through his best-known periodical, XXe Siècle. Although still a relatively unfamiliar figure in the United Kingdom, San Lazzaro is one of the half-dozen great art publishers of the mid-twentieth century who, together with his exemplar, Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939), and those of his own generation, Christian Zervos (1889-1970), Tériade (1889-1983) and Albert Skira (1904-73), chose to base himself in Paris, seeing it throughout his life as the centre of the art world….XXe Siècle, an illustrated periodical, was launched in 1938 and printed in editions of approximately 2,000, each issue containing both photographs and four-colour separation reproductions across a wide spectrum of visual imagery ranging from masterpieces of Western painting to popular prints from the Far East. Its large format, lively design, and close integration of text and image, were immediately striking, but its most innovative feature, introduced at the suggestion of Hans Arp (1886-1966), was the inclusion of original prints by contemporary artists in every issue. With obvious appeal for collectors, XXe Siècle was also designed to introduce a wider, international public to contemporary painting and sculpture through good quality colour reproductions and the immediacy of original prints. Comparable in price to Cahiers d'Art, early issues of XXe Siècle sold out rapidly. While San Lazzaro's own aesthetic preferences tended towards lyric abstraction, he made clear that XXe Siècle was non-partisan [publication ceased during World War II]….in 1951, San Lazzaro relaunched XXe Siècle with thematic issues that were materials based, or centred on a topic of current interest in the visual arts, particularly in Europe: concepts of space, matter, monochrome, mark-making and the sign.' A defining feature of the new series was Italy's artistic dialogue with France for, while San Laz-zaro had originally concentrated on Paris-based painters and sculptors, his aim was to create an international network, to make known the work of French artists in Italy and Italian artists in France, and subsequently extend this bilateral axis to the English-speak-ing world. The artists represented in No. I by an original print were all best known as sculptors: Arp, Laurens, Henry Moore (1898-186) and Marino Marini, San Lazzaro not only sought to show readers the full range of an artist's work, but to encourage the production of prints, a stimulus much appreciated, for example, by Magnelli…. Suffering from failing health, in 1968 San Lazzaro lost overall control of XXe Siècle to Léon Amiel, a printer-publisher who had provided financial backing and helped with distribution in America." Thematic issues now ceased and were replaced by a 'panorama' of the year, but San Lazzaro was still active as a publisher of books and albums of prints….Shortly after his death, San Lazzaro himself was the subject of two exhibitions: 'Omaggio a XXe Siècle' in Milan in December 1974 centred on graphic work by those artists closest to him late in life, while 'San Laz-zaro et ses Amis' at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1975 featured work by all those whose work he had promoted for more than 50 years: Arp, Calder (1898-1976), Capogrossi, Chagall, Sonia Delau-nay, Dubuffet, Estève, Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), Gili-oli (1911-77), Magnelli, Marini, Miró, Moore and Poliakoff. This exhibition was seen by one of his closest colleagues as an indirect portrait of San Lazzaro, a complex man whose modesty and reserve masked his unremitting drive to extend international appreciation of contemporary art, and to bring the reading public closer to its making through the medium of print. JEAN HÉLION (1904-1987) 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. He entered the Institut Industriel du Nord in Lille to study chemistry in 1920 but left the following year to become an architectural apprentice in Paris. He painted while working as an architectural draftsman in the early 1920s. Hélion attracted the attention of the collector Georges Bine in 1925 and was soon able to devote himself entirely to painting. In 1927 he met Joaquín Torres-García, who collaborated on L'Acte, a short-lived magazine founded by Hélion and others. Hélion first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1928. Shortly thereafter he became acquainted with Jean Arp, Piet Mondrian, and Antoine Pevsner. By 1929 his work was nonfigurative. With Theo van Doesburg and others in 1930 he formed the artists' association Art Concret and the periodical of the same name. This group was succeeded by Abstraction-Création the next year. In 1931, after traveling through Europe and the Soviet Union, Hélion returned to Paris, where he met Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Tristan Tzara. His first solo show was held at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1932. That same year Hélion made his first visit to New York, where he was given a solo exhibition at the John Becker Gallery at the end of 1933. After returning to Europe from a second trip to the United States in 1934, he met Jacques Lipchitz, Joan Miró, and Ben Nicholson. In 1936 he settled in the United States, dividing his time between Virginia and New York. That year solo shows of his work took place at the Galerie Cahiers d'Art in Paris and the Valentine Gallery in New York. The artist traveled to Paris in 1938 on the occasion of his solo exhibition at the Galerie Pierre, and he became a friend of Paul Eluard, Matta, and Yves Tanguy. In 1939, he began integrating figurative elements into his work. This return to figuration was the hallmark of his postwar paintings. Shortly after joining the French army in 1940 he was taken prisoner and sent to a camp in Pomerania and then Stettin. Hélion escaped in 1942 and that same year made his way to France and then the United States. His book They Shall Not Have Me was published in 1943, a year in which he was given solo shows at the Arts Club of Chicago and Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century, New York. Hélion returned to Paris in 1946. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s his work was shown in Europe and New York. During the 1970s he exhibited primarily in France. In 2015, Jean Hélion's painting, Abstraction, sold for $3,413,000 USD at Christie's New York, setting a world record for the artist.
  • Creator:
    Jean Hélion (1904 - 1987, French)
  • Creation Year:
    1938
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 12.4 in (31.5 cm)Width: 9.65 in (24.52 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    Auburn Hills, MI
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU1465216659692

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