THE BROTHERS

THIS week the eyes of most art-loving Texans are on oils, not oil. With Houston the center of the American Federation of Arts' 1957 convention, and Dallas, San Antonio and Fort Worth standing by to receive the convention's airlift tour, the four cities' museums, galleries, private homes and department stores have turned themselves into showcases for art, displaying everything from such private collections as Social Leader Ima Hogg's Colonial Americans to a sampling of just about every living Texas painter and sculptor. But the standout exhibit is the handsome tribute, co-sponsored by Houston's Museum of Fine Arts and Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum, to France's three Du-champ brothers, whose talent and eccentricities make the family one of the oddest phenomenons of 20th century art.

Though best known for such flamboyant experiments as Marcel Duchamp's famed Nude Descending a Staircase, the hit of Manhattan's 1913 Armory Show, all three brothers started out dead serious about their art, and it was art that became their common bond. Recalls Marcel: "We had always in our head the famous adage, 'stupid as a painter.' We tried to introduce some brains into the problem."

All for Chess. All three were caught up by the cubist excitement, but Marcel was the first to have his doubts about the movement ("too exteriorized"). In 1912 he tried using a technique borrowed from the cinema to add movement, painted his King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (opposite) to show off his theories. His Chess Players is a conventional impressionist study of his two bearded brothers (Raymond, left; Jacques, right) with their wives in Puteaux. In 1923, after a few zestful years as a leader of the Dadaists (see below), he decided to give up painting for good in favor of chess.

The second brother, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, had turned to sculpture and in only a dozen-odd works advanced to the front rank of early 20th century sculptors before his death in 1918, at 42, of blood poisoning contracted at the front. His crowning achievement is The Horse, combining in one sculptural metaphor both horse and machine.

"Gaston Is No Name." Trailbreaker for the brothers, and the one who in the end has had the longest sustained achievement, is the eldest, christened Gaston, but who quickly changed his name to the more romantic Jacques Villon ("Gaston is no name for anyone, let alone a painter,'' says Marcel). Sobersided and nicknamed "Grandpa" by the family, Jacques Villon has spent a lifetime fishing in the still, deep pools of his own sensibility.

Calling himself a "cubist impressionist," Villon progressed from his 1913 attempt to render cubist rhythms in Soldiers on the March to his lime-cool portrait of his notary father (opposite), who supported Villon's painting efforts off and on for 30 years. Villon, having refined his palette to the utmost, "touched the earth once again" by returning in 1940 to the vibrant countryside of southwest France. Part of his latest harvest: his superb pastoral illustrations for Virgil's Eclogues (TIME COLOR PAGES, June 6, 1955). Today, at 81, the holder of nearly every award the art world has to bestow, Villon can sum up the goal he has largely achieved: "to express the perfume, the soul of things of which science only catalogues and explains the outward appearance."

Brother Marcel, at 69 still spry, witty and eager to shock, would put it a little differently. On his way to Houston last week, where he will lecture the convention on "The Creative Act," he proclaimed: "Painting today is a Wall Street affair. When you make a business out of being a revolutionary, what are you? A crook. As Brancusi used to say, 'Art is a swindle.' "

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