{"id":62925,"date":"2025-01-30T19:59:25","date_gmt":"2025-01-30T18:59:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/?p=62925"},"modified":"2025-01-31T13:30:59","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T12:30:59","slug":"in-the-studio-of-jean-the-painter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/in-the-studio-of-jean-the-painter\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Studio of Jean, the Painter"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Jean appears, hand outstretched and a shining hat of light on his head\u2014a special hat that perhaps only I can see. This thought does not console me. For Jean is entirely inside that hat, and his words fall out of it. It\u2019s a very positive impression: this man does not speak only with his mouth and throat. In all his sentences, there are flashes of light that seem to come from somewhere else, from above\u2014a precious rain that you want to collect in your hands, write down, and record, but that escapes you because it has nothing to do with stylistic effects. But if I try to explain too much, I get confused. The hat was there, and I looked at it. A few minutes later, Jean’s eyes\u2014eyes that I could not see well because they were not probing, just attentive\u2014were resting on me as I sat some distance away in front of a small white wooden table. Resting on me, those eyes? I must have written that out of habit. In reality, I didn’t feel like they were looking at me at all. […] “A portrait is there to show how a person surpasses themselves,” he said. So the physical face seen was only the enclosure, the door that had to be opened, the way to the other face. He continued: “What I am trying to paint is your gaze. I see that it is not in your eyes. But I see that it has its place in your face: a larger region whose contour I recognize.” That was probably not a figure of speech because, for minutes, I had felt a real force pouring into my cheeks and forehead. I felt that there, at least for a moment, the light\u2014not my light, but the light of the world\u2014was advancing and vibrating on the edge of material existence. […] Without the light that we carry within us, our eyes could never open to the luminous objects, the lights of the world. If the fundamental vibration were not within us, we could never perceive a sound. If love were not within us, we could never be in love with that special being that we\u2014perhaps carelessly\u2014call \u201cour love.\u201d If God were not within us, we could never hope to become human. That is exactly what this very clear encounter in the studio of the painter Jean meant and spoke wordlessly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Excerpts<\/strong> from \u201cLe monde commence aujourd’hui\u201d [The world begins today], \u00c9ditions de la Table ronde, 1959, where Jacques Lusseyran comments on his encounter with Jean H\u00e9lion. (Translation from French into German by Louis Def\u00e8che.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translation <\/strong>Laura Liska
Image <\/strong>See paintings by Jean H\u00e9lion in the Goetheanum Weekly<\/em>, issue 5\/2025<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jean appears, hand outstretched and a shining hat of light on his head\u2014a special hat that perhaps only I can see. This thought does not console me. For Jean is entirely inside that hat, and his words fall out of it. It\u2019s a very positive impression: this man does not speak only with his mouth and throat. In all his sentences, there are flashes of light that seem to come from somewhere else, from above\u2014a precious rain that you want […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21272,"featured_media":62499,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8796,8848],"tags":[11603,11607,8819],"class_list":["post-62925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-column","category-literature","tag-ausgabe-1-2-2025-en","tag-english-issue-5-2025","tag-seeds"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21272"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62925\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}