Jacques Villon: Six Decades of Painting

The Duchamp household into which Jacques Villon was born in 1875 produced more than its share of artists.  Villon’s brothers Marcel Duchamp and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and his sister, Suzanne Duchamp, were all successful artists, and it was Villon’s grandfather, Emile Nicolle, who first inspired him to the practice of art by teaching him etching. Trained at home, Villon later attended the Lycée Corneille and the Art School, both in Rouen.

In 1895, Villon settled in Paris.  At this time, his life as an artist began to blossom during the evenings he spent at the Moulin Rouge with Degas and Lautrec.  It is from this period that he began to experiment with lithography, creating posters for artistic cabarets and movies (signed as Montcorbier).  Villon also drew for an assortment of weekly publications.  Beginning in 1906, the artist became increasingly interested in painting, and an important breakthrough occured for him when he was introduced to Cubism in 1911.

In 1903, Villon was included in the Salon d’automne in Paris.  From that time, his exhibition history is dense.  A small sample includes his 1905 two-man exhibition with his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon in Rouen.  He participated in the infamous International Exhibition of Modern Art (The Armory Show) in New York in 1913.  

In 1919, he began his first abstract period in which he experimented with lightly colored canvasses in monochromes of grey and brown.  But in the early twenties Villon became interested in the objective properties of light and color.  After a short period of abstract work when he belonged to the Abstraction-Creation group, the artist returned in the thirties to direct study of form, with a predominance of pure color.  For the middle part of the of the thirties, he traveled and exhibited widely.  In the early forties Jacques Villon began to paint landscapes, a subject he had rarely attempted before.  Over the next two decades up until his death in 1963, the artist widely exhibited his paintings, drawings and etchings. The work of Jacques Villon is represented in most major museum collections.