| Jacques Villon: Christened Gaston Duchamp, Jacques Villon came from an exceptionally talented family. His brother, Marcel Duchamp, and his sister, Suzanne Duchamp, were both leading modern painters, while another brother, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, made his mark as a sculptor. Jacques Villon first studied art in Rouen (1895) before finishing his education in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.
Early in his career, Villon established himself as a leading neo-Impressionist and worked with such fine artists as Steinlen and Willette. Like most Art Nouveau pieces from the turn of the century, Villons etchings and lithographs explored stylistic concerns that were largely set in motion by Toulouse-Lautrec. Even in such early work, however, Jacques Villon was reaching out to a new artistic vocabulary. By 1912 Villon, along with Gleizes and Metzinger, had emerged as an early and important Cubist artist. His reputation reached international levels shortly after the end of World War One as he continued to assimilate modernist ideas into his art. During the following years Jacques Villon continued in the front rank of modern art for his talented abilities to synthesize the colors of Fauvism with the structures of Cubism and for producing abstract and lyrical decompositions of shapes and surfaces |
