André Villers

• Name — André Villers • Born — 10 October 1930 • Birthplace — Beaucourt, France • Died — 1 April 2016 • Place of death — Le Luc, France • Occupation — Photographer, painter, paper artist

Villers was born in Beaucourt. In 1947, following a bone tuberculosis, he was hospitalized at a sanatorium in Vallauris where he stayed for eight years. During that period, he was introduced to photography and started making in 1952 his first experiments in the darkroom, and pictures of Vallauris and its inhabitants. He met Picasso there in March 1953, who offered him his first camera, a Rolleiflex. Villers produced many portraits of the painter, and their relationship evolved into working together, making hundreds of images based on photographic experiments. In 1962, Heinz Berggruen edited a book, Diurnes (Daytime), based on thirty of these images accompanied by an original text by Jacques Prévert. Since the 1950s, Villers shot many portraits of great artists, among them: Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder, Jacques Prévert, Alberto Magnelli, Oliver Mark, Jean Arp, Le Corbusier, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Jean Cocteau, Bram van Velde, César Baldaccini, Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages, Antoni Clavé, Antoni Tàpies, Francis Ponge, Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, Léo Ferré, Michel Butor, Ben Vautier, Henri Dutilleux, and Zao Wou Ki. In 1970, he began to experiment with a new way of creating his photography without a camera. He made the negatives himself from pieces of tracing paper. This series was exhibited and a book was released with a text by Michel Butor, Pliages d'Ombres (Folding Shadows). Since then, his personal photographic work was based upon experimentation with shadows and transparencies. He tried to use several emulsion techniques (solarisations, jets of developer). In the mid-1950s, Villers began a set of carvings titled Ex-Photos that were exhibited in 1970 at the Loeb Gallery in Paris. In the 1980s, he did a set of paintings on cardboard, The Photographers, exhibited in Paris, Tokyo and New York by the Yoshii Gallery. His friend David Douglas Duncan devoted a book to it entitled A Secret Garden. In the 1980s, Karel Appel made a set of paintings on photographs of Villers. Later, Robert Combas also worked with him. In 1984, he published his text Photobiographie recounting his life, his artistic process and his relationship with Picasso in a special issue of Les Cahiers du Sud dedicated to him. Since the 2000s, he produced a set of paper cuts works. Significant collections of his photographic work can be found at the Nicephorus-Niepce Museum in Chalon-sur-Saône and the Museum of Photography in Charleroi in Belgium. The city of Mougins in the Alpes Maritimes honored Villers with the creation of a Musée de la photographie André Villers. The museum closed in 2018, and in 2021 the Mougins Center of Photography opened in its place. On 14 July 2006, Villers became a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. He died on 1 April 2016.

• 1982 Le Photographe s'appelle André Villers Alain Bedos, 52 Mn • 1987 La Conférence des photographes Jean-Michel Vecchiet, 26 Mn • 1996 Picasso-Villers, Diurnes Jean-Michel Vecchiet, 26 Mn • 1998 Les 1001 Visages d'André Villers Jean-Michel Vecchiet, 52 Mn • 2010 Portrait d'André Villers Robert Matthey, 26mn • 2016 André Villers, A Lifetime in Images Marketa Tomanova, 62mn

The following is established of the heading itself.

The following is established of origins and background. Villers died in 2016 at Le Luc. Recorded at birth as André Eugène Villers. It is also recorded that andré Villers was born in 1930 at Beaucourt.