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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 ''.