The etchings were made by Villon and the text based upon 1920's text written by Crotti. Born in Bulle, Switzerland, Crotti first studied painting in Munich when he was eighteen, and after a year under Jules Lefevre at the Academie Julian in Paris, he abandoned formal instruction. He exhibited regularly at the Salon des Independants beginning in 1908, at the Salon d'Automne from 1910 and Salon des Tulliers in 1927. The critical event of his artistic career was his arrival in June 1915 in New York, where he worked closely with Marcel Duchamp, joined the New York Dada group, and met Picabia. Crotti produced mechanical drawings, wire constructions, and collages on glass and metal. Returning to Paris in 1919, he married Suzanne Duchamp. Together in July 1921 they launched a new movement, Tabu-Dada (apparently inspired by Picabia), which Crotti described as the expression of "Mystery...That which cannot be seen...That which cannot be touched." In Crotti's Tabu work, spheres and sectors float on the canvas like orbiting planets. The movement attracted no adherents, however, and by 1923 Crotti had turned to a more sculptural and less abstract cubist style. Later he developed a stained-glass process, gemmaux, which he used in the 1930s and 1940s to re-create works by such artists as Matisse and Picasso. A retrospective exhibition was held at the Musee d'Art et d'Histoire, Fribourg, in 1973.Jacques Villon was born Gaston Duchamp on July 31, 1875, in Damville, Normandy. While still a lycee student in Rouen he began his artistic training under his grandfather, Emile Nicolle, who taught him engraving. In 1894 be began to study law at the University of Paris; that same summer be entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Rouen and shortly thereafter started to send his drawings to local illustrated newspapers. After securing his father's reluctant permission to study art on the condition that be continue his law studies, he returned to Paris where he attended the Atelier Cormon. He adopted the name Jacques Villon in 1895. For almost ten years the artist worked largely in graphic media, contributing drawings to Parisian illustrated papers and making color prints and posters. In 1903 he helped organize the drawing section of the first Salon d'Automne. In 1904-05 he studied at the Academie Julian in Paris, painting in a Neo-Impressionist style. Villon's first gallery exhibition, shared with his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon, took place at Galerie Legrip, Rouen, in 1900. He began to spend more time painting about 1906-07 and from 1910 devoted himself primarily to it. In 1906 he settled in Puteaux. There, in 1911, he and Duchamp-Villon started to meet with the Puteaux group, which included their brother Marcel Duchamp, Kupka, Picabia, Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Leger and others. That same year Villon named and helped found the Section d'Or. He exhibited fine paintings at the 1913 New York Armory Show and sold them all. Villon's first one-man show in America was held at the Societe Anonyme, New York, in 1921 by the thirties he was better known in the United States than in Europe. In 1932, he joined the Abstraction-Creation group and exhibited with them. An important exhibition of Villon's work was held in Paris in 1944 at the Galerie Louis Carre, from that time his exclusive representative. Villon received honors at a number of international exhibitions, including First Prize, Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, 1950, and Grand Prize for Painting, Venice Biennale, 1956. He designed stained-glass windows for the cathedral at Metz in 1955. Villon died on June 9, 1963, in Puteaux, at the age of eighty-seven. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.