Jean Hélion adopted the style of radical abstraction on display in Composition at the start of the 1930s. For about two years he worked mainly with lines and two-dimensional shapes with right angles. The 1930 manifesto of the short-lived Art Concret artists’ group, which he cofounded in Paris with the painter Theo van Doesburg and other artists, justified this strict approach: Painting does not depend on resemblance to objects. The work of art has its own meaning, based on the formal variables of line, plane, and color. And geometric figures in flat space rendered with precision are universal and permanent. Hélion would move to a more supple and curvilinear method of composition in the mid-1930s. Then, at the end of the decade, he would shift again, this time to scenes of everyday life in a figurative style that retained some of the rigorous structures of his abstractions.