First Bucolic: Virgil Expelled from the Earth by a Centurion 1955

Jacques Villon made this around the time of the first world war, and looking at it you can see that something’s up. The palette is simple and clean. The artist has reduced the world to a set of geometric forms, like he’s seeing it all through a fractured lens. I can imagine Villon in his studio. He’s probably thinking about the pastoral tradition in art and poetry, trying to bring it up to date. You know, the way he flattens everything gives you an idea of how he felt about modern life. The centurion's pointing finger is so sharp, so insistent. And old Virgil looks like he’s being forced to leave, to pack up his scrolls. The way Villon has approached the medium is fascinating. How the linear forms have been so carefully arranged, and then infilled with these delicate washes of colour. It reminds you how artists are always wrestling with the past, trying to make it new. And here he’s using all these tools and methods to say that, in modernity, even Virgil can't rest.