Jean Helion Quotes & Sayings

A harmonious combination ... enough abstraction that the image is sustained by the eye; enough reality that it is sustained by reason and experience. Share this quote with a friend — Jean Helion

You don't dream about angles and surfaces and so on. You dream about women, bread, smokes and trees. — Jean Helion

Paul Klee seems to handle colors and dreams as if they both came out of a box of children's toys. He plays and dreams with whatever he finds. — Jean Helion

Art is, from any point of view, the greatest of risks. — Jean Helion

A mature artist is at the same time aware of the futility of his achievement and the validity of the pursuit. — Jean Helion

No doubt, in complete abstraction one has a feeling of a great shock, if not an explosion, and in approaching the real, one feels health and truth restored ... — Jean Helion

Sometimes when looking through my pile of drawings, I find an image that ... awakens in me a passionate desire to inhabit it, as though I were to feel more at home in it than in myself. — Jean Helion

I understand abstract art as an attempt to feed imagination with a world built through the basic sensations of the eyes. — Jean Helion

The image gets built one way or another ... it doesn't get done by following the natural order of things, but arises instead from an order that you have in your mind. — Jean Helion

All each ism does, in its revolt against the inadequacy of the previous one, is to thoroughly upset the order of terms of this ideal entity and to bring to the fore yet another inadequacy. — Jean Helion

Imaginations blossom amidst memories. One judiciously separates them - but is there really any point in that? Doesn't truth suffer when one amputates it from its context of dreams? — Jean Helion