Shetinin’s Villon series is an outstanding phenomenon in Russian Twentieth-Century art. These are thousands of drawings created throughout more than half a century, all of them stemming from a tiny little poetry book by the 15th century French poet François Villon. In his final years Shetinin was even dreaming of celebrating his ninetieth anniversary with an exhibition called “60 years with Villon”. Why did François Villon mean so much to the Russian artist? Was it because of his outcast and vagabond lifestyle, his criminality in the eyes of law and society? Or because of his gift, his poetic talent that in itself is a crime against social mores and that makes him sound so modern, recounting things that poets of the new era are unable or simply afraid to tell? It’s not a coincidence that Villon became a respected icon for the Russian artistic community, as a symbol of the conflict defining the Russian art of the past century: the conflict between culture and authority.
