A Family Affair

Gaston was trained to be a lawyer, Raymond a doctor, Marcel a librarian. But to young men out for excitement in turn-of-the-century Paris, the studios of Montmartre were irresistible, so the Duchamp boys all ended up artists. Even sister Suzanne tagged along, tried her hand at brush and canvas. Last week a Manhattan exhibit of the four Duchamps gave a nostalgic glimpse of modern art's brash young cubist days, and brought the Duchamp family up to date.

GASTON changed his name to Jacques Villon so that his disapproving father, a provincial lawyer, would not know that he was neglecting the law for art. Now, at 76, he has a solid place among France's old guard modernists. In such recent canvases as La Grande Faucheuse aux Chevaux he uses brighter colors than in early days, but sticks to his conviction that nature is most interesting when reduced to blocks.

RAYMOND, who died in 1918, was one of the first and ablest cubist sculptors. His powerful, beetle-browed bust of Poet Charles Baudelaire showed that he also had an impressive gift for conventional portraiture.

SUZANNE, 62, is married to a French artist, Jean Crotti, still paints expressionist oils and watercolors in her spare time. Her most striking contribution to the exhibit was a lighthearted portrait of a middle-class French wedding party which she painted in 1924.

MARCEL, 64, is the most famous of the Duchamp brothers. After a dozen years as modern art's No. 1 bad boy, in 1923 he gave up such experiments as his stroboscopic Nude Descending a Staircase in favor of chess, has scarcely touched a brush to canvas since. Last week, along with witty reminders of his bumptious youth, he displayed his first artistic creation in 15 years, a tiny pencil drawing of a chessman. Said Marcel, who lives in Manhattan: "I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art--and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position."

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