Oil on canvas, 1966, signed and dated with monogram at lower left, inscribed and signed to verso, retaining label of James Bourlet & Sons Ltd., London, unframed.

12 x 16 in.

From the Collection of the late Pedro Millan, Sr., Caracas, Venezuela and Raleigh, North Carolina

Jean Hélion was born in Couterne, Orne, France, and moved to Paris in 1921. While on a research project at the Louvre, he decided to become a painter. By 1925, he began studying the figure at the Académie Adler. Helion was an early painter of abstract art, having been introduced to cubism by the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres-García. In 1928, he exhibited for the first time, showing two paintings at the Salon des Indépendants.

Hélion moved to the United States in July 1936, staying in New York and later Rockbridge Baths, Virginia where he built a studio. While he continued painting abstractly, his work increasingly trended toward representation. Hélion returned to France in 1940 to join the armed forces in World War II. Taken prisoner in 1940, he was held captive on a ship until 1942, when he escaped. Hélion resumed work in the United States in 1943, developing the cartoon-like style in the post-war era. In the 1960s he abandoned oils for acrylics, which he used for the rest of his career. His eyesight deteriorated due to a brain tumor throughout the 1970s, and by 1983 he had stopped painting. He died in Paris in 1987.

Hélion's work is in many French museums, as well as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Kunsthalle Hamburg, and the Tate Gallery, London.

Good estate condition, slight rubbing to the edges.