Hélion's style changed radically over his seven-decade career. In the early 1930s he was so committed to abstraction that he became one of the theorists of the Abstraction-Création movement, which held that abstract artworks should be derived solely from abstract forms, not from distilled representations of real things. By 1935 Hélion was moving away from strictly geometrical work, and painted a series of these faceted and sliced floating figures, which seem to hint at the human body. By decade's end Hélion had returned to figure painting almost entirely.

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