Jacques Villon after Fernand Léger, Woman with jar, after Fernand Léger, 1928

Jacques Villon, handwritten notice

Color engraving entitled Woman with jar after Fernand Léger (1928) by Jacques Villon. Prints with aquatint medium annotated at bottom left « engraved by Jacques Villon 1928 » (* «gravé par Jacques Villon, 1928 »).
Fernand Léger’s painting shows a woman dressed in a blue sweater and a green skirt carrying a pitcher. Black outliner and stylized forms characterize the Leger’s style. This painting considers woman as a Greek goddess and as a decorative object. Woman become a character-object and its enforced by the missing of individuals elements, everything, as the jar and as the body, is seen as a decorative element.
This kind of treatment of colors and forms contrast is part of the « plastic realism » movement in Léger’s production.
Several serials of this engraving exist, the more famous is one from 1928 edited by Galerie Bernheim, signed by the artist and printed in 200 copies. Our engraving is not signed and stamped but had a hand mark on the back “Andrée”.

Jacques Villon, also known as Gaston Duchamp, was a cubist painter and printmaker. He was the brother of well-known Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Suzanne et Marcel Duchamp.  It’s this last one that influenced a lot Jacques Villon’s artistic direction toward cubist movement. After Jacques Villon was formed in Fernand Cormon’s painting workshop, his artistic identity strengthen in his own Puteaux workshop, which became an artistic creation center and also a place to exchange ideas for iconic figures such as Kupka, Picabia, Léger in the Puteaux Group (*Le Groupe de Puteaux). Precursor of modern art in the United States at the Armory Show exhibition in 1913, he achieved a greater success in the USA than France. This engraving serial was then realized in his life to earn money in a period of financial hardships.

Sources (in French) :

• Vanessa Morisset, « Fernand Léger », Monographies – Grandes figures de l’art moderne, Dossiers pédagogiques, Centre Pompidou, Direction de l’action éducative et des publics, avril 2008

Ressource disponible en ligne sur le site du Centre Pompidou, consulté le 22 novembre 2018, URL = http://mediation.centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ENS-Leger/ENS-leger.html

• Biographie de Jacques Villon en ligne sur le site de l’Encyclopedia Universalis, consulté le 22 novembre 2018, URL = https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/jacques-villon/