Jacques Villon

Jacques Villon (1875-1963), French painter and printmaker, and brother of French artists Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti. He was born Gaston Emile Duchamp but adopted the pseudonym of Jacques Villon as a tribute to French medieval poet François Villon.

In 1894, after completing secondary schooling in his native Normandy (Normandie), Villon settled in Paris with his brother Raymond, who was initially a student of medicine but soon decided to become a sculptor. Villon studied in Montmartre with French artist Fernand Cormon who had also been a teacher of French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Villon worked as a cartoonist and illustrator for various magazines before settling in 1906 in the Parisian suburb of Puteaux, far from the fashionable Montparnasse and Montmartre districts, in order to devote more of his time to painting. This isolation, together with his modest nature, ensured that Villon's work remained relatively unrecognized until late in his life. He exhibited at the renowned Armory Show in New York City in 1913, which helped introduce European modernist art to the United States (see Modernism), and sold nine paintings there. However, he remained essentially unknown throughout the 1920s and 1930s. By the late 1940s, when French gallery owner Louis Carré began promoting Villon's work, the artist had produced 700 to 800 canvases and a considerable number of prints.

Villon's work demonstrates the connection between the various schools of French painting prevalent at the time. His analytical precision owes much to neoimpressionism and his purely geometric forms, free interpretation of the surrounding world, and strict organization of space on the canvas are modeled on cubism. Villon's skill in combining these elements, supported by his use of pure color, produced pictures that are at once refined and stimulating. His search for a better understanding of the relationship between space and rhythm and between line and color is best expressed in his painting L'espace (1932, Gallerie Louis Carré & Cie).

In 1950 Villon received the Carnegie Prize, the highest award for painting in the world, and in 1956 he was awarded the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale exhibition. He was given the title of Commander in the French Legion of Honor in 1954. Villon died in his Puteaux studio, his workplace for almost 60 years.