WRITING ABOUT PAINTING: JEAN HÉLION IN ENGLISH

1 0 0 Y W R I T I N G A B O U T P A I N T I N G J E A N H É L I O N I N E N G L I S H D E B O R A H R O S E N T H A L ‘‘Painting is a language,’’ Jean Hélion notes at the end of one of the articles the French painter wrote in English. This terse statement, the climactic final sentence of his essay ‘‘Poussin, Seurat, and Double Rhythm,’’ makes a challenge to the reader – and to the viewer. Hélion challenges himself, his fellow painters, and everybody who looks at paintings to look for as much fullness and experience and meaning in a painting as they expect to find in a great piece of writing. He urges them to regard a painting’s elements as an alphabet, with its complex forms making up a vocabulary deployed as a syntax. But in writing this, Hélion also poses a paradox, a riddle, for painting is an eloquent language but also a mute one. And many good and great painters have chosen to remain silent next to their works – more, indeed, than have written about them. Why then do painters write about painting? Though this question would elicit di√erent answers when raised about di√erent artists, it is hard to imagine Hélion’s not writing. He was an articulate and cerebral artist whose gift for language led him to write major articles not only in French but also in English, a language not his native tongue. Even so, he more or less warns his 1 0 1 R readers that no words can supply a lack in the painting; the painting must do everything in the language of painting that the painter can make it do. Anything that an artist might write about painting – even a well-chosen and apposite title for a picture – is overflow, extraneous to the pictures, which must stand on their own as independent and whole utterances. Hélion’s ‘‘painting is a language’’ may even be seen as a challenge thrown up to speech or writing: Does writing about painting reduce painting? Explain it away? Translate it into an inadequate ‘‘equivalent’’? Ultimately, Hélion’s copious writings may pose the question whether, for an extremely articulate painter, the mute language of painting can su≈ce. Many twentieth-century artists would argue that it cannot, among them Braque, Klee, Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Matisse. In the writings of the creators of modernism, I think it is possible to hear, however faintly, a desperation – a desperation to engage with words when the mute language of painting has undergone a change that threatens to render it unintelligible. Like Wordsworth, whose poetic diction banished the fanciful flourishes of eighteenth-century language, the modernists transformed the language of painting so that people found that language , as Randall Jarrell once joked of Wordsworth’s, so simple they couldn’t understand it. And so we have both expository, rationalized ‘‘theoretical’’ writing by these artists – such as Kandinsky ’s Point and Line to Plane – and hortatory, oracular writings such as Braque’s notebook aperçus, or Mondrian’s ‘‘Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art’’ and Klee’s ‘‘Creative Credo.’’ Jean Hélion was an artist of overflowing energy and talents, a man whose hugely productive life in the studio was, throughout a career that went from the 1920s into the 1980s, always accompanied by writing. He had been painting seriously only a few years before he became involved in Parisian literary-art publications. From then on, his writing on painting ranged widely: articles surveying the whole field of European abstract art, essays on painters of the past who he thought had particular importance for painters of his day, descriptions of his studio practice, analysis of his own paintings , diaristic musings on art, life, relationships, and work. When, in the vividly idiosyncratic English that Hélion used to write his essays, we find the word maximum several times, we 1 0 2 R O S E N T H A L Y should see not only...