Jacques Villon

Art Brokerage: Jacques Villon French Artist: Jacques Villon (July 31, 1875 - June 9, 1963) was a French cubist painter and printmaker. Born Gaston Emile Duchamp in Damville, Eure, in the Haute-Normandie region of France, he came from a prosperous and artistically inclined family. While he was a young man, his maternal grandfather Emile Nicolle, successful businessman and artist, taught him and his siblings. An exhibition of Jacques Villon's work was held in Paris in 1944 at the Galerie Louis Carr, following which he received honors at a number of international exhibitions. In 1950, Villon received the Carnegie Prize, the highest award for painting in the world, and in 1954 he was made a Commander of the Legion of Honor. The following year he was commissioned to design stained-glass windows for the cathedral at Metz, France. In 1956 he was awarded the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale exhibition. Among Villon's greatest achievements as a printmaker was his creation of a purely graphic language for cubism an accomplishment that no other printmaker, including his fellow cubists Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque, could claim.