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Lot Essay
Patrick Bongers has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
During 1913, the year before the start of the First World War, Jacques Villon attained in his art a distinctive quality of linear refinement that is rare, perhaps even unmatched elsewhere in the cubist avant-garde of the new School of Paris, unless one holds up for comparison the paintings of his younger brother Marcel Duchamp, which display complex compositional structures rendered with similarly exquisite precision. Both painters evoke novel, elaborate conceptions of the figure set within the formal and spatial ambiguities of an imagined environment, yielding results that are as sensual as they are enigmatically poetic. If Villon could claim, however, any more advanced aspect in his art that Duchamp could not or did not wish to rival, it was his feel for color, as evident in the present L'Acrobate, using deepest black and measured grays amid delicate hues and tints that the painter educed from the primaries on his palette.
Jacques Villon was the pseudonym that Gaston Duchamp took from François Villon, the fabled outlaw poet of medieval Paris, which his other brother Raymond, a sculptor, also incorporated into his name, as Duchamp-Villon. Already an accomplished engraver and illustrator of the contemporary scene, Villon in his mid-thirties immersed himself in the cubist movement. He later described himself as the “cubist impressionist” (Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1957, p. 28). There is in Villon’s carefully plotted pictorial architecture a vaporous, evanescent dimension, a kinetic state of transformation, such as the artist discerned in Italian Futurist painting, an approach which Picasso and Braque abhorred in their analytical appreciation of the cubist object. We observe in L'Acrobate, as a preliminary watercolor sketch reveals (see D. Robbins, exh. cat., op. cit., 1976, no. 54), the darkly gossamer figure of a circus acrobat walking on his hands, his legs raised in the air. This character aptly lends this picture its title; the composition is a consummate study in balance sought and achieved.
“For the acrobat Villon renounced mass...and instead visualized energies alone—the acrobat’s dexterous movements pitted against the force of gravity,” Robbins explained. “The surrounding space is suffused with an energy that emanates from the center of the picture: for the first time in a work of Villon an environment is suggested in completely abstract terms” (ibid., p. 74). Barely clinging to the apparition of a figural presence, Villon’s L'Acrobate balances ever so precariously on the verge of absolute abstraction, as one finds elsewhere in Paris modernism on the eve of the Great War—by artists whom Villon and his brothers hosted at weekly gatherings in their home in the Paris suburb of Puteaux—in Robert Delaunay’s Fenêtres, Kupka’s Localisations des mobiles graphiques, Picabia’s Danses, Léger’s Contrastes de formes, and Severini’s Espansion de la lumière paintings.
When Marcel Duchamp urged them to exhibit together as a salon in 1912, Villon gave their effort the name Section d’Or, a reference to the ideal proportions of part to whole that Da Vinci discussed in his Treatise on Painting, a book Villon advocated as essential reading to all his colleagues. “For me, the picture is a creation in which the subject—the pretext furnished by a perceived rhythm, expressive of our unconscious life brought to the level of consciousness—is translated into areas of color, into a hierarchy of colored planes,” Villon declared. “The whole is bound together by an arabesque, closely incorporated into the basic division of the canvas where all elements are brought into balance” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1957, p. 31).
During 1913, the year before the start of the First World War, Jacques Villon attained in his art a distinctive quality of linear refinement that is rare, perhaps even unmatched elsewhere in the cubist avant-garde of the new School of Paris, unless one holds up for comparison the paintings of his younger brother Marcel Duchamp, which display complex compositional structures rendered with similarly exquisite precision. Both painters evoke novel, elaborate conceptions of the figure set within the formal and spatial ambiguities of an imagined environment, yielding results that are as sensual as they are enigmatically poetic. If Villon could claim, however, any more advanced aspect in his art that Duchamp could not or did not wish to rival, it was his feel for color, as evident in the present L'Acrobate, using deepest black and measured grays amid delicate hues and tints that the painter educed from the primaries on his palette.
Jacques Villon was the pseudonym that Gaston Duchamp took from François Villon, the fabled outlaw poet of medieval Paris, which his other brother Raymond, a sculptor, also incorporated into his name, as Duchamp-Villon. Already an accomplished engraver and illustrator of the contemporary scene, Villon in his mid-thirties immersed himself in the cubist movement. He later described himself as the “cubist impressionist” (Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1957, p. 28). There is in Villon’s carefully plotted pictorial architecture a vaporous, evanescent dimension, a kinetic state of transformation, such as the artist discerned in Italian Futurist painting, an approach which Picasso and Braque abhorred in their analytical appreciation of the cubist object. We observe in L'Acrobate, as a preliminary watercolor sketch reveals (see D. Robbins, exh. cat., op. cit., 1976, no. 54), the darkly gossamer figure of a circus acrobat walking on his hands, his legs raised in the air. This character aptly lends this picture its title; the composition is a consummate study in balance sought and achieved.
“For the acrobat Villon renounced mass...and instead visualized energies alone—the acrobat’s dexterous movements pitted against the force of gravity,” Robbins explained. “The surrounding space is suffused with an energy that emanates from the center of the picture: for the first time in a work of Villon an environment is suggested in completely abstract terms” (ibid., p. 74). Barely clinging to the apparition of a figural presence, Villon’s L'Acrobate balances ever so precariously on the verge of absolute abstraction, as one finds elsewhere in Paris modernism on the eve of the Great War—by artists whom Villon and his brothers hosted at weekly gatherings in their home in the Paris suburb of Puteaux—in Robert Delaunay’s Fenêtres, Kupka’s Localisations des mobiles graphiques, Picabia’s Danses, Léger’s Contrastes de formes, and Severini’s Espansion de la lumière paintings.
When Marcel Duchamp urged them to exhibit together as a salon in 1912, Villon gave their effort the name Section d’Or, a reference to the ideal proportions of part to whole that Da Vinci discussed in his Treatise on Painting, a book Villon advocated as essential reading to all his colleagues. “For me, the picture is a creation in which the subject—the pretext furnished by a perceived rhythm, expressive of our unconscious life brought to the level of consciousness—is translated into areas of color, into a hierarchy of colored planes,” Villon declared. “The whole is bound together by an arabesque, closely incorporated into the basic division of the canvas where all elements are brought into balance” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1957, p. 31).