In recollection he has said: "Natural or man-made objects kept coming into my head, but I would suppress them sternly".
Moreover, he organized the movement of his forms, within his rigorously shaped space, into highly complex equilibriums;
and used gradations of color value as well as sharply contrasting elementary colors.

The worthy Mondrian, seeing these pictures, said in a tone of kindly reproof: "But you are really an artist of the naturalistic tradition"!
Helion did not realize it at the time, but it was true.

His "monumental" abstraction, made up of smooth, metallic "non-objects" acting upon each other with great tension, won Helion much acclaim during the 'thirties.
The play of novel lighting effects also entered into these compositions, whose controlled power and varied activity made them well worth meditating.

As Helion's work showed more and more nostalgia for the world of man and nature, the pure abstractionists expressed some disapproval;
but Leger, Arp, Lipchitz and Alexander Calder, at the time, gave him their blessing.
His canvases nowadays bore titles frankly declaring them to be "Figures In Space", or "Blue Figure", or "Pink Figure";
and they had (vaguely) heads and feet.
Exhibited in shows in London in 1935, and in New York the following year, the new, more elaborated abstracts were much favored in the circles of the modernists as three-dimentional dramas of great intellectual coherence.
At this period the thirty-year old Helion was ranked "as one of the mature leaders of the modern movement", according to Herbert Read, "and in the direct line of descent from Cezanne, Seurat, Gris and Leger".
In America, Meyer Schapiro observed that, unlike the Mondrian school, Helion "sought a return path to the fullness of nature within the framework of abstract art".

It is notable that at this time he was writing with admiration of Cimabue's and Poussin's way of filling space.
Abstract art was still the right path for him;
but, he held, instead of continuing as an "art of reduction", it must grow, must make a place for the contributions of the Raphaels and Poussins as well as for those of the early cubists and Mondrian.

Later Helion wrote of this phase: "For years I built for myself a subtle instrument of relationships -- colors and forms without a name.
I played on it my secret songs, unexplained, passionate and peaceful".

But his own work was evolving further.
The extreme limitations he sensed in all current abstract art made that seem to him increasingly arid and cold.
He was engaged in constant experiments that searched for new directions.
Where would it all lead?
He himself did not know, as he said in 1935.
But he was "afraid of the future -- he would in fact welcome a way back to social integration, a functional art of some kind".

During the 1920's the Abstractionists, the German Bauhaus group of industrial designers, and the new architects all had the dream of some well ordered utopia, or welfare state, in which their neat and logical constructions might find their proper place.
But whereas the postwar American abstractionists seem to Helion to be determined to "escape" from the real world, or simply to rebel against it, the ordered abstractions which he and his associates of the 1930's were painting embodied the hope of "improving" things.
"We were possessed by visions of a new civilization to come, very pure and elevated", he has said, "in fact some ideal form of socialism such as we had dreamed of since the war of 1914-1918".

Instead of this the 1930's witnessed a tragic economic depression, the rise of Fascist dictators in Europe, the wasting Civil War in Spain.
Very much the political man, Helion felt himself deeply affected by the increasingly pessimistic atmosphere of France and all Europe, whose foundations seemed to him more and more shaky.
In 1936 he decided to migrate to America.
The Rooseveltian America was a haven of liberalism and progress and seemed to him to constitute the last best hope for civilization.
Helion also hoped that America's mastery of technology and industrial efficiency would be accompanied by the production of new and beautiful art works.
"I arrived in the United States with the idea of establishing myself there more or less permanently and finding inspiration for new compositions".

In New York he was well received by what was then only a small brave band of non-figurative artists, including Alexander Calder, George K. L. Morris, De Kooning, Holty and a few others.
After a year in a studio on Sheridan Square, having married an American girl who was a native of Virginia, Helion moved to a village in the Blue Ridge mountains, where he produced some of the most imposing of his abstract canvases.

The darkening world scene, at the time of the Munich Pact, continued to trouble his mind even in his remote Virginia studio.
"Fear possessed me, and the certainty of war", he has related.
"I truly smelled blood, death, heaps of corpses everywhere".
In haste he labored to finish some last abstract paintings: a three-panel frieze, with a flying figure and a fallen figure;
a "Double-Figure", which went to the Chicago Art Institute, and is considered by him the most successful of his abstracts;
and in early 1939, a "Fallen Figure" of very ominous character, which concluded his abstract phase.
"I knew I was carrying on with abstraction to its very end -- for me", he said of the two years' output in Virginia.
With those paintings of big constructions crashing down, he felt he could stop.
They were, in effect his last testament to non-objective art.

He had taken out first papers for American citizenship;
but after war came to Europe, he decided to return to France, arriving there in January, 1940.
"I hated the war", he said, "but thought I ought to go because I was, perhaps, one of those who hadn't done enough to prevent it".

In June, 1940, Sergeant Helion, with a company of reserve troops waiting to go into battle, was sketching the hills south of the Loire River, when the war suddenly rolled in upon him.
Its first apparition was a long, gloomy column of refugees riding in farm wagons, or pushing prams.
His company then carried out a confused retreating movement until it was surrounded by the Germans, a few days before France capitulated.
After a sort of death march during four days without food, Helion and his comrades were shipped by cattle-car to a labor camp at an estate farm in East Germany.
A year later they were removed to a Stalag in the harbor of Stettin.
At the time of his capture Helion had on his person a sketchbook he had bought at Woolworth's in New York.
When he was stripped, deloused and numbered by his guards, his much-thumbed sketchbook was seized and thrown on a pile of prisoners' goods to be confiscated.
"It was then I knew that they were making war against Man, the individual within!
-- who questioned things when given orders".

At Stettin the university-educated artist, who had studied German, was chosen to serve as interpreter and clerk in the office of the Stalag commander.
In secret he also acted as a member of the prisoners' Central Committee, which plotted sabotage, planned a few escapes, and maintained a hidden control over the wretched French slave-laborers.

In the Stalag, Helion came to know and love his comrades, most of them plain folk, who, in their extremity, showed true courage and ran great risks to help each other.
How much they esteemed him is shown by the fact that their underground committee selected him as one of the few who would be helped to escape.
In the prison camp's Black Market civilian clothes were quietly bought and forged papers were devised for him;
during long weeks the plan for his flight was rehearsed.

Every morning contingents of prisoners would be sent out to labor in nearby factories.
One evening, while a volley-ball game was being played in the yard among the prisoners remaining there, a simulated melee was staged -- just as the gates were opened to admit other prisoners returning from work.
As Helion wrote afterward:

"Their sentry followed.
Four hands were stretched toward me by my comrades behind me.
Marquet held my briefcase;
Finot held a wallet with my money and papers;
Moineau and David held nothing but their fingers.
They felt rough and kind and warm.
At this moment the volley-ball hit the ground.
Duclos ran toward Desprez with fists raised.
The guards all rushed up to intervene"

Shedding his prison cloak, Helion shot through the gates, now clad in civilian garments and with the passport of a Flemish worker.
Riding trains, hitching hikes on trucks across Germany, slipping through guarded frontiers with the help of secret guides, he eventually reached Vichy France, and, by the winter of 1943, was back in Virginia.
He wrote:

"To escape from a prison camp required a very special state of mind;
not only loathing of captivity, but a faith, a hope that is even stronger.
I left behind me brave men, whom captivity had robbed of all hope.
They too loved their families, longed for their villages: yet lacked the faith that drove one to dare the fearful chance of escape".

It was a time of revelations for him.
Even the most rational of men, under great stress, may be transported by a new faith and behave like mystics.
Helion knew that he owed his freedom as much to the self-sacrifice of his fellow-men in Arbeitskommando 13,, Stettin, as to his own fierce will and love of life.
After that, he declared, "to return to freedom was to fall to one's knees before the real world and adore it".
In prison he had been able to sketch nothing but figures from life, his guards, his companions in misery.
Now all his desires centered on "rediscovering and singing of the prosaic and yet beautiful world of men and objects so long barred from me by a barbed wire fence".
And, he added: "During the many months in prison camp, all abstract images vanished from my mind".

Before leaving for America, he happened to see his old friend Jean Arp and confided to him his new resolutions.
Arp protested: "But it is impossible!
Everything in the way of representation has already been done by the old masters".
Helion, however, clung to the belief that "in escaping from the Stalag I had also escaped from Abstraction".

While convalescing in his Virginia home he wrote a book recording his prison experiences and escape, entitled: They Shall Not Have Me Published originally in (Helion's) English by Dutton & Co. of New York, in 1943, the book was received by the press as a work of astonishing literary power and one of the most realistic accounts of World War 2, from the French side.
It was very widely read, too;
and the author, who seemed the embodiment of France's rising spirit of resistance to her conquerors, was much complimented for his daring military action.
But when he showed his new figurative pictures to his artist friends of the abstract camp, they paid him no compliments and drew long faces.

Between 1944 and 1947 Helion had a series of one-man shows -- at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery in New York and in Paris -- of his new realistic pictures.
They reincarnated the figures of human beings banished from his canvases since the 1920's.
These new pictures focussed on the familiar and commonplace objects that he had heard the men in his prison camp talking about as the things they missed most, hence associated with the sense of lost freedom: the cafe at the corner, the newspaper kiosk, the girls in doorways and windows along the street, the golden-crusted French bread they lacked, the cigarettes denied them.
One of the pictures was of a man with hat drawn over his face ceremoniously lighting a cigarette;
others were of men doffing their hats to each other, carrying umbrellas with pomp, reading newspapers, or simply showing loaves of bread spread out.