lithograph on paper, signed
mounted, framed and under glass

Label verso: The Redfern Gallery, Ltd., London
Note: Jacques Villon, born as Gaston Duchamp, was a French Cubist and abstract painter, printmaker, and illustrator. The oldest of three brothers who became major 20th-century artists, including Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Marcel Duchamp, he learnt engraving at the age of 16 from his maternal grandfather, Emile-Frédéric Nicolle (1830–94), a ship-broker who was also a much appreciated amateur artist. In January 1894, having completed his studies at the Lycée Corneille in Rouen, he was sent to study at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris, but within a year he was devoting most of his time to art, already contributing lithographs to Parisian illustrated newspapers such as Assiette au beurre. At this time he chose his pseudonym: Jack (subsequently Jacques) in homage to Alphonse Daudet’s novel Jack (1876) and Villon in appreciation of the 15th-century French poet François Villon; soon afterwards this new surname was combined with the family name by Raymond. Marcel Duchamp and their sister Suzanne Duchamp (1889–1963), also a painter, retained the original name. Villon’s work as a humorous illustrator dominated the first ten years of his career, but from 1899 he also began to make serious prints, exhibiting some for the first time in 1901 at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. By 1903 he had sufficient reputation in Paris to be an organizer of the first Salon d’Automne. He consciously began to expand his media in 1904, studying painting at the Académie Julian and working in a Neo-Impressionist manner. His printmaking style, formerly influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec, moved towards the fashionable elegance of Paul César Helleu. Villon’s art and reputation were in full flower at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. By 1916 he was transferred from an infantry regiment serving at the front to a camouflage unit at Amiens. There is reason to believe that the two years during which he worked at camouflage caused him to study color theory, especially M. A. Rosenstiehl’s Traité de la couleur (Paris, 1913). A new and systematic use of color is visible in the austere and pure abstract paintings produced by Villon just after the war. In works such as Nobility (1920), Joy (1921; both priv. col., see 1976 exh. cat., pp. 98–9 and 102) and the Colour Perspective series (e.g. Colour Perspective, 1921; New York, Guggenheim) Villon expanded his compositional approach. This now involved careful preparation and systematic distortion derived from the techniques of the etcher, including reversals and rotations, with the experience he had gained through camouflage of the deceptions of color. Villon insisted that a visual idea be incorporated into a canvas from its moment of origin, with the object only as a starting-point and its forms represented by planes adjusted to the proportions of the picture. Along with Gleizes, he was one of the few French artists who explored abstraction during the early 1920s, for example in The Jockey (1924; New Haven, CT, Yale U. A.G.), but again the thrust of his painting activity was interrupted. The Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris, prompted by a group of their exhibiting artists who knew of Villon’s skill as a printmaker, approached him with the idea of making a series of reproductive prints after established modern artists such as Manet, Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, André Derain, Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy and Bonnard. Between 1922 and 1930 Villon made about 40 such color aquatints, at first fulfilling the requests of the gallery but after 1927 asserting his own choices; these included family members Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp and his former brother-in-law Jean Crotti and friends such as Gleizes, Metzinger and Mare. Shortly before his death, Villon recalled the 1930s as a time in which he worked in almost complete isolation, ignored or regarded as a marginal figure. He spent most of World War II living in the country, either at the home of André Mare’s wife in Bernay or at the farm of her daughter, Mme Mare-Vené, at La Brunié in the Tarn. Having become interested in landscape only in the mid-1930s during a trip to Provence, Villon now alternated intimate pictures of farm life (e.g. Kitchen-garden at La Brunié, 1941; Cleveland, OH, Mus. A.) with abstract and sometimes grandiose landscapes based on a synthesis of the entire high plateau region from Toulouse to Albi. In painting the Bridge at Beaugency (1944; Paul Mellon priv. col., see 1976 exh. cat., p. 152) he evoked a traditional musical round (‘Orléans, Beaugency, Notre Dame de Bercy’) familiar to all French children. Works such as the Three Orders (1944; Richmond, VA Mus. F. A.), while consistent with his interest as a Cubist in subjects with epic resonance, assumed a special significance after World War II because they showed a resilient French past in spite of the Occupation. Louis Carré took Villon into his gallery in Paris, giving him his first one-man show since 1934. Villon very quickly re-established his reputation and his influence on a younger generation. He won numerous prizes during this period: the Grand Prix de la Gravure at the Exposition Internationale in Lugano (1949); first prize at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (1950); Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale (1956); and the Grand Prize for painting at the Exposition Internationale in Brussels (1958). In the course of a long and productive life, Villon illustrated or contributed original prints to 27 books, of which only two, Architectures (Paris, 1921) by Louis Süe and André Mare and Poésies (Paris, 1937) by Pierre Corrard, appeared before World War II. His editions of Paul Valéry’s French translation of Virgil, the Bucoliques (Paris, 1955), and Jean Cocteau’s French translation of Hesiod, Les Travaux et les jours (Paris, 1962), and François Villon’s Grand Testament (Paris, 1963) are among the most admired of his later illustrated books. In 1963, the year of his death, he was elected Grand Officier de la Légion d’honneur.