VIRGIL BY VILLON

A FEW artists, like a few wines, mature very slowly.

France's Jacques Villon, vintage 1875, is a case in point. On view at Manhattan's Lucien Goldschmidt bookstore last week was Villon's latest and perhaps greatest claim to a permanent bin in the wine cellar of art history. His new triumph: a $350-a-copy edition of Virgil's Eclogues, illustrated with 25 superb color lithographs.

Though Villon has made more than 600 prints in his long career, the Eclogues was his first major try at book illustration. Like all lasting illustrations, his works liberate rather than confine the imagination of the reader. He presents no bluntly defined scenes but bathes the pages in storms, mists and sunny fields of color. His tenuous drawing comes through the color only by degrees; then it whispers convincingly of the lofty world and divine forms that Virgil more robustly describes. Whether Villon is picturing the morning sun or a fertile valley at evening (opposite), he excites the observer's memory and imagination to fill out and give weight to the scene. He has the tact not merely to show his meaning but to share it.

Villon's father, a stern Norman notary named Duchamp, sent him to Paris to study law. The youth took up painting instead, changed his name to conceal the fact. Later, two brothers and a sister joined him on Montmartre. One, a cubist sculptor, called himself Duchamp-Villon. Painters Suzanne and Marcel (Nude Descending a Staircase} Duchamp braved their father's wrath by using the family name. Marcel was by far the most successful artist of the family, but he was bored by his work. He finally gave up painting for chess.

Villon kept hard at art. He was not so much bored as boring --a dry and impecunious cubist. He made a living from newspaper cartoons, architectural renderings and engravings of paintings by his more famous friends. Meanwhile, decade by decade, his art mellowed, the cubist dregs dissolved, and the professorial dryness came to be replaced by a joy in life. At 70, he began to receive the homage of painters young enough to be his grandchildren. Now, at 79, he is among the prides of Paris.

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