Villon: Slike

The book is part of the Yugoslav series Mala umetnička encyclopaedija (volume 56), a popular edition of small pocket monographs on modern artists (10 pages of text plus 15 pages with reproductions). It is a translation of a 1963 work (Fernand Hazan, Paris, Petite encyclopédie de l'art), while the text is by Raymond Cogniat (1896–1977), a French art critic and art historian, specializing in modern French art.

The book includes an introductory essay on the life and work of Jacques Villon (real name Gaston Émile Duchamp, 1875–1963), the older brother of Marcel Duchamp and Raymond Duchamp-Villon. Villon was a key French Cubist and Abstract painter, printmaker and illustrator: from early Impressionist and Fauvist influences, through the development of Cubism (analytical and synthetic), through Orphic experiments with color and light, to the later abstract compositions of the 1940s and 1950s. The emphasis is on his precise, intellectual aesthetic, geometric forms, transparency and role in the development of abstract art.