L’Oiseau (The Bird)
Jacques Villon, L’Oiseau (The Bird), drypoint and etching, c. 1921, signed in pencil lower right and inscribed “tire a 50″ lower left margin [also signed and dated in the plate]. Reference: Ginestet and Pouillon E293, only state. From the first edition of 50 (additional impressions were pulled for the book Eloge de Jacques Villon by Jacques Lassaigne in 1955). In very good condition, tiny spot on matrix upper center, on laid paper with wide margins with deckle edges, 4 x 6 5/8, the sheet 6 1/2 x 9 5/8 inches, archival mounting (hinged between acid free boards, window mat and mylar cover).
A fine rich impression.
This is one of Villon’s most successful small cubist prints in which he varies the patterns and textures of each plane. Villon succeeds largely because of his awareness that creating the successful cubist print does not call for mechanical adherence to structure or formula; he notes that although in transforming the object into a cubist artwork there is no room for chance, one must allow a place for poetry and mystery in the cubist work. This may help explain his apparent use of phosphorous (or some grain) to create tiny patterns of dots here and there, as well as his use of irregular spacing and shading in what at first glance would appear to be highly regularized linear patterns.
He wrote: “Ce qui m’a seduit dans le Cubisme c’est la recherche de creation, la discipline qui conduit au tableau volontaire, ordonnance, ou il n’y a plus place pour le hasard. L’oeuvre d’art devient ‘chose en soi’, s’appuyant sur le sujet, mais le transformation pour en faire une creation nouvelle qui dans son organisation voulue, contienne un peu de la poesie, du mystere de la vie.” So, cubism shouldn’t be just mechanical adherence to a discipline, it should have some poetry, some mystery.