Old Toast

Painter Jacques Villon is a good-humored little Norman with the flush of many fine dinners and good round wines on his smooth old face. He lives in a garden studio on the northwest edge of Paris, enjoying a belated triumph.

If it had not been for the Nazis, Villon might never have done so well as an artist. With his wife, he fled Paris a jump ahead of the German army in 1940 and spent three disconsolate months near Toulouse. There he did the first landscapes of his career--neatly representational sketches that might have been made by an architect on vacation. Then he wandered back to Paris and spent the rest of the war years turning out cubist paintings based on his landscape sketches.

New Path. His Paris work, on view in a Manhattan gallery last week, had ended Villon's long career as a rather dull Old Faithful of cubism. To make a little money for his old age, Villon had had to turn aside from his dogged cubism to do newspaper cartoons, architectural prints, and color reproductions of the paintings of his famous contemporaries. In his new life, he no longer had to worry about such workaday chores. At 74, Villon was selling as never before, and he had become the toast of Paris' young painters. His new pictures, they agreed, pointed a new path for French art.

In composition, Villon's landscapes were as cubist as ever. He had broken the trees, rivers, mountains and towns of southern France into thin flakes and shavings of color, and though he obeyed the laws of perspective in applying his painted patchwork to canvas, he used different perspectives for each patch. As a result, his pictures looked rather like panoramas painted into the pleats of an accordion. Even his self-portrait appeared to have been painted on creased and crumpled paper: the self-possessed face was only half there.

But two qualities saved Villon's new work from being classed as "second-period cubism," i.e., art that derives from the early days of Braque and Picasso but dilutes their experiments into decorative and fairly understandable patterns--something for the living room. The first quality was the clear cold space in Villon's landscapes: deserting table-top still lifes, he had found a little of the space and sweep of the out-of-doors. The second quality was in his colors. As a reaction against the sunny hues of impressionism, the cubists had often painted with what looked like birdlime and various fine shades of mud. Villon reversed the process: his landscapes seethed with the brightest, sharpest and sometimes shrillest colors he could mix.

New Name. Villon was born Gaston Duchamp. He took on the name "Jacques Villon" back in the '90s, when he was painting in secret on Montmartre and trying to convince his father, a stern notaire, that he was really attending law school. Two brothers and a sister eventually followed Jacques to Montmartre. One of them, a sculptor, called himself "Du-champ-Villon" but Suzanne and Marcel (Nude Descending a Staircase) Duchamp braved whatever wrath was left in their disappointed father and painted under their own names.

Marcel Duchamp long ago gave up painting in favor of chess, a choice brother Jacques will never make. At an age when most artists begin helplessly repeating themselves, Villon was painting better and more boldly than ever. His new ideas are just as exciting to Villon as to his admirers. "If I am to complete all the pictures I've been thinking about," he says, "I must hurry on with it, you know."

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