Hélion moved to the United States in July 1936, staying in New York and later Virginia. While he continued painting abstractly, he increasingly felt that his work was tending toward representation, and he began drawing from life. His reading of Baudelaire directed him toward a concept of modernity in which the most ephemeral aspects of contemporary life are reconciled with the timeless and the geometric. He believed that Seurat, who he called "the last great master, and Léger, the greatest after him", especially exemplified this Baudelairian modernism. Hélion's work underwent a radical change—one that would confound his admirers—when he abandoned abstraction decisively in 1939. His first large-scale figurative canvas, "With Cyclist" ("Au cycliste"), revealed a simplified and streamlined treatment of form that is related to Léger's style of the 1930s.