Jacques Villon

The seventy years of Jacques Villon's long working life, from 1891 to 1961, coincided with the development of modern art. When he was in his teens and making his first prints, many artists were pursuing Symbolist themes, seeking their subjects in the imagination and the subconscious. Villon occasionally adopted this idiom but his early work most strongly reflected the satirical approach and social concerns of Toulouse-Lautrec. In the early 1900s Villon turned to the Belle Epoque style, in which artists delighted in the depiction of beautiful women in the elegant fashions of the day. His principal contribution to the development of modern art was in Cubist paintings and prints, made between 1911 and 1914. Here form was simplified into facets and shifting, intersecting planes as time, movement and the illusion of successive action were introduced into his compositions.

Jacques Villon, born Gaston Duchamp (1875–1963), was the eldest child in a highly cultivated French provincial family from Rouen, preoccupied with art, literature and music. The family also relished games, especially chess, which Villon and his brother, Marcel Duchamp, loved to play. His father allowed Jacques to study art in Paris only if he would study law concurrently. When the young man became an illustrator for the popular papers, his father asked him to change his name and the artist chose Villon, because of his admiration for the fifteenth-century poet, François Villon, the wandering brigand whose ballads immortalized medieval Paris.

Villon's two brothers also became distinguished artists: Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876–1918) was a gifted young sculptor, fascinated by form in movement and the role of the machine in art; the youngest of the three, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), took New York by storm in 1913 with his painting Nude descending a staircase, which scandalized those who went to the exhibition because of its modernity. Later, Marcel's 'readymades', such as the urinal submitted to a show as sculpture with the title Fountain, and Bottle Dryer in the Australian National Gallery Collection, helped to establish the notion of conceptual art, in which the idea, rather than the artist's manipulation of his material, is of first importance.

From 1910 the three brothers belonged to a group of Cubist artists which met in the Puteaux district of outer Paris and included the painters Léger, Metzinger and Gleizes. This group was intellectual in character, its members 'reasoning' each painting before it was begun. Although there was some interaction with the ideas of the Italian Futurist group of painters which included Severini and Boccioni, Villon and his friends regarded as simplistic the Italians' film-like overlaying of successive stages of movement and developed a rigorous scientifically based version of Cubism by fragmenting objects into planes.

Because of his mathematical leanings, Villon suggested the name Section d'Or (Golden Section) for an exhibition of the work of the Puteaux group in 1912. The Golden Section is the mathematical proportion in which the smaller part is to the larger part as the larger part is to the whole. Among the ideas which Villon absorbed were the geometric principles for constructing a picture put forward by the Italian Renaissance painter Leonardo da Vinci in his Trattato della Pittura (Treatise on Painting), the mathematical theories of his own time and the role of chance. All these contributed to the works he painted then and also for the Abstraction-Création group in the early 1930s and provided him with the underlying grid which features in his etchings during that decade.

When he was sixteen years old, Villon was introduced to printmaking by his maternal grandfather, Emile Nicolle, of Rouen, a retired shipbroker turned engraver who taught him etching on wet Sunday afternoons. At an artists' supplier in the town Villon saw drawings by Toulouse-Lautrec and began to send his own drawings to magazines. When he went to Paris in 1895 he continued to submit satirical, frequently salacious, cartoons to Parisian journals which included L'Assiette au Beurre (The Plate of Butter), Le Sourire (The Smile) and Le Courrier Français (The French Mail). These journals enjoyed a large circulation and were available in cafes and theatres throughout Paris and provincial France. Villon's drawings were reproduced by photo-relief processes in these magazines or were sometimes printed lithographically in supplements.

Between 1897 and 1910 Villon submitted a drawing to Le Courrier Français every week, learning to draw swiftly and accurately and to capture essential detail. This training was of immense benefit to his later work. His reputation grew and when in 1899 he decided to make posters in the fashionable medium of colour lithography there was a market for his work. In 1899 Lautrec was seriously ill and when he died two years later Villon became his artistic successor. La danseuse au Moulin Rouge (Dancer at the Moulin Rouge) is a notable lithograph that Villon designed in the master's style.

Villon became an accomplished printmaker at a time when there was renewed interest in artists' prints although in order to make money he had to pander to public taste to some extent. In 1900 he began to make large colour aquatints, intended for purchase by the middle classes as substitutes for paintings; in prints like Sur la plage (On the beach) of 1905, he used colour aquatint to emphasize the soft and airy atmosphere of a summer beach scene, which might have been rendered by the water-colour washes that his aquatint suggests. The composition of this print draws on many earlier studies Villon made. An artist interested in experimenting, Villon constantly returned to subjects which had interested him, reinterpreting them in painting or in one of the graphic media.

In the years around 1900, the period known as the Belle Epoque, Villon also made a great many austere black-and-white studies in drypoint of beautiful women in the manner of the fashionable artist Paul-César Helleu. This training developed his facility in a range of intaglio print techniques which sustained him in his Cubist prints. A harbinger of Villon's move towards Cubism is the etching of two figures, L'aide gracieuse (Gracious aid) of 1907, made under the influence of the Swedish etcher, Anders Zorn. Here Villon freed his etching style, introduced hatching which runs over the composition, softened the outlines and established a surface texture enmeshing figure and ground. In works of about this time, such as Les haleurs (The haulers), Villon turned his attention to what he described as 'the inner line of movement'. This new interest in a synthesis of movement and form leading to distortion is thought to have been partly inspired by the Cézanne retrospective exhibition of 1907 in Paris.

Between 1911 and 1914 Villon made the Cubist intaglio prints on which his reputation as a graphic artist is substantially based today. In his series of four intaglio portraits of the mulatto girl Renée, the daughter of one of the artist's cousins, he simplified realistic detail and emphasized sculptural volume and mass. In studies of this period he broke up surfaces into rectangular planes; by 1913, in Yvonne D. de face (Yvonne D. full-face) he was constructing the whole composition out of small volumetric pyramids.

In his Cubist prints, as in his earlier work, Villon's tendency was to work from relatively naturalistic studies of his subject towards abstraction. He said, 'l make an analysis straight from nature so that I may have time to think it over.' His drypoint, La table servie (The dinner table) of 1913, derived from a naturalistic sketch in pencil and grey wash, subsequently served as the basis for a drawing on squared paper in which the objects on the table, enlarged, become the subject. In this drawing, the artist established with a line he described as 'like the flight of a fly' the contours and forms of his final composition. In one of three paintings of the same subject, he completed his arrangement of the objects on the table and worked out the distribution of light, which in the drypoint appears as faceted planes. Villon's Equilibriste (Tight-rope walker) series derives from naturalistic sketches, but by the time of Le petit équilibriste (The little tight-rope walker) of 1914, he was less interested in the physical details of the performer than in visualizing his energies. In this drypoint a linear arabesque, overlaid on a concentration of triangular planes, depicts the acrobat's movements and realistic detail has been almost entirely eliminated.

Villon's experience and reputation as a master engraver led to a commission, from the Paris picture-dealer Bernheim-Jeune, to reproduce major nineteenth and twentieth-century French paintings as colour aquatints. These included Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the grass), which had provided a model for Villon's own experimental print La lecture sur l'herbe (Reading on the grass) of 1910, Cézanne's Les joueurs de cartes (The card players) and Renoir's La loge (The theatre box). The 'gravures d'interprétation', as they are known, are technical miracles. Villon supported himself by selling these complex images between 1922 and 1930.

In 1920-21 Villon moved closer to geometric abstraction in a small group of intaglio prints which included L'oiseau (The bird) and Noblesse (Nobility). Villon's point of departure in Noblesse was the figure of a seated woman, to which he applied a reductive principle that he called 'constructive decomposition' in which the subject is divided into horizontal planar slices, rearranged as flat geometric shapes placed one on top of the other and viewed from the side. In 1932-33 Villon exhibited these prints, as well as more recent paintings, with the Abstraction-Création group in Paris. The 1920s were generally hostile to abstraction and his paintings and prints of this time tend to be more closely tied to naturalistic models than his earlier work, although the underlying grid is often used.

Success came late to Villon, who in 1937 received two diplomas of honour and the Gold Medal for painting and engraving at the International Exhibition, Paris. During the war Louis Carré sought Villon out, became his exclusive dealer, and purchased almost the entire contents of his studio. In 1944, an extremely successful exhibition of the artist's paintings was held in Paris. However, it is not for these but for his prints, particularly his colour aquatints of the Belle Epoque and his Cubist paintings and engravings, that Villon is highly regarded today.

Tony Palmer
1984