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This article profiles French painter Jean Hélion. At eighty-one, Jean Hélion is one of the two major living representatives of the classic prewar School of Paris. Like Balthus, who is the other, he has never conformed to fashion; and, perhaps for that reason, he has received inconsistent attention in New York. This is rather a pity, for Hélion worked here off and on for about five years in the late thirties and early forties, and few French painters have played so important a part in the history of the New York avant-garde. Nonetheless, even his most devoted admirers in the U.S. have found it hard, down the decades, to keep track of his many successive interests and achievements. Because Hélion has lived so long yet has shown only intermittently in this country, every generation of U.S. viewers must practically discover him for itself. His style is constantly changing, so every generation has its own Hélion, and his work as a body remains permanently out of focus. As if to complicate matters, his images are often too dense with meaning to be emotionally grasped without a lengthy acquaintance. The masses of derelict objects he has painted in the past few decades--threadbare hats, eviscerated pumpkins, wilting plants--inevitably remind someone of flux and decay, and his sketchy figures can often seem, like so many parvenus at a party, only memorandums for an impossible version of themselves.

The article profiles painter François Boucher. He lived from 1703 to 1770, his adulthood, coinciding very nearly with the reign of Louis XV. The son of a Parisian artisan and painter, he was a bustling, big-nosed man known for his witty repartee. In his early thirties Boucher married a beautiful girl named Marie-Jeanne Buseau. He was not only a superb painter but also a fine draftsmen and engraver and a designer for the Sèvres china factory and the Beauvais and Gobelins tapestryworks. More than 80 of his paintings and a number of tapestries and porcelains executed after his designs will be display in New York from February 22 to May 4, 1986, after which the exhibition will travel to Detroit, Michigan where it will be on view from May 27 to August 17 before going on to Paris, France. Boucher painted many different sorts of pictures and absorbed many influences, yet in the end his esthetic lineage tells us little about him. All is transformed by his sensuality and humor and craving for theatrical effect. At first he specialized in conventional though brilliantly composed examples of bambochade, a genre featuring picturesque peasants with assorted animals and children.