Jean Hélion (1904-1987) a french painter. 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. During his life Helion met and worked with many artists like Jean Arp, Piet Mondrian, Antoine Pevsner, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Tristan Tzara, Jacques Lipchitz, Joan Miró, and Ben Nicholson. 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.
