The exhilarating exhibition “Jean Helion,” currently on view at the National Academy Museum, is extremely welcome and long overdue. But the artist deserves even better.

Helion (1904-87) was one of the greatest and most original painters of the 20th century – and today is one of the most underrated. He is fairly well known in his native France, but virtually unknown here. He is in a class, and has much in common, with his friends Arp, Mondrian, Calder, and Leger. No other artist I can think of painted the everyday objects and rituals of the modern age with such candor, love, and off-hand elegance.

In Helion’s paintings, the fedora, the automobile, the baguette, the shop window become talismanic. The simplest of things and acts take on an informal mysticism. Women, towels, umbrellas, and newspapers open like shells or unfold like flowers. Shop-window mannequins feel like emissaries for our age – as they do in the photographs of the same subject by Atget. Abstract and mechanical, Helion’s mannequins feel oddly more alive, demure, and gracious than his figures.

“In Paris,” Helion wrote in 1974, “I have often seen young people kneeling in front of their motorbikes, making their devotion to the flat tire that needs to be revived. This commonplace act has always struck me as religious.” When he painted a nude, or men in hats reading newspapers on park benches, or an umbrella on a chair, or a cut-open pumpkin, he pared down form to impersonal yet surreal essentials. They became portraits not of individuals or of specific things but of a place and time and attitude that can only be described as Modern.

The National Academy retrospective, the first in an American museum in more than 40 years, celebrates the centenary of the artist’s birth. In 1921 Helion moved from Normandy to Paris to work as an architect’s apprentice. He was fascinated by the assembly, and makeup, of things. In his paintings, objects (a lone shoe, glove, hat, musical instrument, or mannequin’s limb) are scattered with pieces of jarring, unnatural color (lime green, hot salmon, cobalt violet). All seem lost and waiting, as if spread across a table in a flea-market – a favorite Helion subject.

In Paris he met the Uruguayan Constructivist master Joaquin Torres-Garcia, who introduced him to Cubism, abstraction, and the early, fussy, still-lifes and furrowed landscapes of Miro. He also discovered the power of the Louvre’s Poussins, which help account for his devotion to classicism.

His first abstractions were based in the primary colors and right angles of Neoplasticism, but by the early 1930s the curve entered his work, and a feeling for color. In the 1930s he made biomorphic, cylindrical abstractions in which the cool, crystalline color of Poussin can be felt in highly polished puzzle forms. Helion’s abstract twisting, marble-smooth, faceless volumes – powdery soft, silvery, and pearlescent – take to heart Cezanne’s maxim about seeing the world through the cone, the cylinder, and the cube. They are lucid forms that, reminiscent of broken Greek columns, feel mythical and primary.

Helion shifted to representation in the early 1940s, a time when most artists were moving the other direction. His earliest figures were of men in hats. “Defense d'” (1943), a beautifully shorthanded, calligraphic picture of a man in suit, tie, and bowler hat (which rides his oval head like a boat), is almost an abstraction. Everything in Helion’s paintings from the 1940s onward – the cracks, hair, wrinkles, wood grain, folds, and shadows; the raucous, rustling color – was nervously animated, just short of frighteningly surreal. During the 1950s, Helion would explore a tightly rendered realism which verged on the surreal.

“The Studio” (1953), a picture of numerous paintings strewn about a vast room, is the only hyperrealist work in the show. Everything is tightly interlocked and overlapped, and it is not always clear where the paintings end and the studio begins. In “The Exhibition of 1934” (1979-80), a picture of his first solo exhibition at the John Becker Gallery in New York, an abstract painting grows threateningly off the wall, turning into an altar and an abyss.

In “Wrong way up / A rebours” (1947), a three-part picture of an abstract painting, a male figure, and a nude hanging upside-down from a window, every form feels analogous and swims between figuration and abstraction. Her breasts are perfect circles on a flat ground; the abstract painting and easel become a stand-in for a figure, and the man’s body is a jumble of abstract shapes.

Helion was more than just a great painter. He was a huge influence on other artists through his ideas and extremely vocal advocacies. In 1930, with Theo van Doesburg, he formed the group Art Concret; in 1931, with Arp, van Doesburg, and Herbin, the Abstraction-Creation group; and during his decade in America, he had tremendous influence on a number of American artists. A final gallery at the National Academy, a kind of addendum, is devoted to his influence in America. It includes 10 paintings by such artists as Leland Bell, Nell Blaine, and Louisa Matthiasdottir.

There are some great pictures in that room, but I wandered about them with mixed feelings. Helion certainly had a lasting impact on the painters – artists who deserve full-blown retrospectives of their own – yet art is not a club. It is a go-it-alone venture, and the last gallery, rather than illuminating connections between unique voices with great talent, tends to muffle and homogenize that quest. The retrospective would have been better served with more pictures by Helion himself.

This show is a truncated version of what originated at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The New York installation includes many key works, but a look at the catalog shows much that is missing. The show offers only 36 paintings and no drawings. (A coinciding exhibition of the artist’s works on paper opens today at Tibor de Nagy Gallery.) It includes none of the mural-size diptychs and triptychs from the 1960s and 1970s – masterpieces that stand as some of the most beautiful and ambitious large-scale paintings produced after “Guernica.”

We must be grateful to the National Academy, a plucky, perfect venue for important art that is being neglected by the big institutions. Without their efforts, this essential show might have disappeared. But the question remains: Why wasn’t “Jean Helion” picked up by MoMA, the Guggenheim, or the Met – venues that could mount an exhibition three times as large and draw enough visitors to make Helion the household name he deserves to be? Let’s not wait another 40 years, please.

Until October 9 (1083 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, 212-369-4880).